This is not an article about whether you need to be baptized, how to be saved, or explaining all the ins and outs of conversion. All of those questions are essential ones and uncountable gallons of ink have been spent discussing them. In this article I want to move beyond them. Assume the answers and lets get to what happens next.
Once you are a Christian, what does it mean to be a Christian? How do Christians act? What does a Christian life, a Christ-like life, look like?
Christianity is not meant as some quaint philosophy or some medicinal shot of brandy to numb your sense of reality throughout the rest of you life. Jesus Christ and His Apostles were right there in the mud and blood of humanity. The experienced people and their best and at their worst. And the religion, the system of belief and action the professed and taught, is not some aetherial morphine meant to distract you from this life with the spiritual equivalent of an opioid high. Christianity is the real solution to the problems of the world. Within its teachings, Christianity holds the power to do what all political systems have promised but never achieved. Christianity can end war, end crime, end poverty, and bring peace in the here and now. But only if the people professing it actually live it.
That is what this article is about: How you live as a Christian and, in doing so, transform the world.
To determine how Christians should act, I will be sticking completely with the New Testament. In this way we can capture what the Savior Himself taught as well as how His Apostles elaborated upon those teachings to created a guide for Christian conduct. While I originally wanted this to be a single article, the topic is too deep and too important to be treated lightly, necessitating me breaking that single article into two parts. In this article, Part 1, I look at who we are as humans as as God’s children, how that affects how we should treat one another, how this relates to how we show our love for God and others, and how we fulfill Christ’s command to love our enemies. Ultimately, through both Part 1 and Part 2, I will demonstrate that a Christian life is founded upon an ethic of nonviolence and universal brotherhood that precludes a Christian from ever harming others and instead seeks to redeem others through the power of self-sacrifice, service, and love.
The Children of God
The first thing Christianity teaches us is who we are and what our relationship is to God, because once we know these two essential truths then we understand why we should act the way we do.
So, who is God? While teaching about one of the purposes of suffering – to discipline us to God’s service -the Apostle Paul explains our relationship to God:
Endure suffering as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? If you do not experience discipline like everyone else, then you are illegitimate children and not true sons. Furthermore, we have all had earthly fathers who disciplined us, and we respected them. Should we not much more submit to the Father of our spirits and live? Our fathers disciplined us for a short time as they thought best, but God disciplines us for our good, so that we may share in His holiness.
Hebrews 12: 7-10, emphasis mine
Who is God? He is the Father of Our Spirits. His fatherhood isn’t a metaphor or a symbol. It is literal. Just as our earthly fathers are the fathers of our bodies, God is the father of our spirits. Hence why Christ taught us to say, “Our Father in Heaven,” (Matthew 6:9) and told Mary Magdalene that He ascended “to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” (John 20:17) Just as God was the actual father of Christ, God is also actually our Father, the difference being that God was also the physical father of Christ, hence Jesus is the Only Begotten Son of God (John 3:16), while God is only the Father of Our Spirits, as Paul teaches.
What does it mean to be a son or daughter of God? Paul also explains this to us:
12 So then, brothers, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh. 13 For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 14 For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God. 15 For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” 16-17 The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.
Romans 8:12-17 emphasis mine
There is a great deal to unpack here. The most important here is what Paul means when he says “the Spirit of adoption as sons,” because if we are adopted sons then how can we be the spiritual children of God and how can He be the Father of Our Spirits? How do we solve this apparent contradiction in order to understand our relationship to God?
First the word translated as “adoption” here is huiothesia, a word invented by Paul and only ever used by him. As a result, its meaning isn’t easily understood. It is a combination of the Greek words hyiós, “son” and títhēmi, “to place,” and most translators have understood this “son placing” to mean adoption, i.e. a child is placed with a family who adopts him. A great discussion about the problems with traditional translations this word and decoding its meaning can be read here. One of the main issues is that if Paul meant legal adoption then there was no reaosn for him to use this word. There was already a Greek word for adoption, meaning Paul wouldn’t need to invent one. Which begs the question, why he would go through the trouble to invent a word that already existed if he meant the same meaning as the already existing word? I doubt that, being so fluent in Greek that he could invent words in the language, it was an issue of him not knowing the word. The only logical conclusion here is that he meant something else.
The key is looking at the verse in Greek and understanding that what Paul is talking about is not a legal adoption but our attitude to our relationship with God. The spirit in “Spirit of adoption” should not be capitalized. The Greek word here is pneuma which means “spirit” without reference to the Spirit, as in the Spirit of God or Pneumati Theou as in Romans 8:14. Here Paul is talking about the contrast in our attitudes, one before coming to God and the other after having come to God. Before conversion we had the spirit and attitude of slaves – slaves to sin, slaves to death, slaves to Hell. After our conversion we have gained the spirit or attitude of sons. It is this new attitude of sonship that is being placed within us as we learn who we are and the potential that gives us. We start living up to our identity and potential as we come to understand who we truly are as Children of God. We begin to think and act as a child of God should.
What is that potential? Paul tells us in Romans 8:16. We are the tekna Theou, literally the “child, son, daughter, offspring, descendant” of God. We are the literal Offspring of God. This alone should tell us that the common assumption that huiothesia means legally adopted children is wrong because adopted children, no matter how beloved, are never the literal offspring of the adopted parents. But we are the literal offspring, the literal Children of God and as the Children of God we are also the heirs of God. As Children of the King of Heaven and Earth we are His heirs, equal heirs with Christ to everything He inherits. And what does Jesus inherit from God? The very Throne of Heaven, which He also gives to us to sit upon with Him. (Revelation 3:21) Through Christ we inherit divinity and rule in the Kingdom of Heaven, seated as kings and queens upon the throne of God. Of this divine potential the Christian theologian C.S. Lewis wrote:
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.
There are no ordinary people.
You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.
Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.
The Weight of Glory, pgs. 45-46 print verison and pgs. 26-27 PDF verison.
Once we have the spirit of sonship placed within us, once we know we are the children of God and spiritual brothers and sisters is a powerful transformation of how we see ourselves, others, and the world. The realization of who we are, who all people are, calls us not to pride, but to humility. All people are our brothers and sisters, deserving our utmost love, respect, service, and mercy. To hurt one of them is domestic abuse. To kill one of them is fratricide. This is why early Christians rejected violence. They even and refused to join the military and government because both of these roles demanded they hurt others. The commandments of God and the good of their brothers and sisters surpassed any earthly authorities, its needs and its commands. As we learn the truth of the divine heritage of all people the same transformation as happened to them happens to us. Our hearts are drawn out to be of use to all people and to our mutual Father, to do good to all people and to serve the purposes of the Lord. And this dual yearning brings us to the Two Great Commandments.
The Two Great Commandments
Once, a group of Pharisees came to Christ and asked Him:
“Teacher, which commandment is the greatest in the Law?”
Jesus declared, “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”
Matthew 12:36-40
Christ’s answer here is masterful and instructive. The Pharisees were asking Him a question designed to get Him to say something that they could use to divide Him from His followers by either taking a stance they didn’t like or by showing Him to be defunct in understanding the Law of Moses. Instead He first quotes Moses:
You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
Deuteronomy 6:5
This establishes well His knowledge of the Law and then He follows it up by adding His new teaching, that the Second Great Commandment is to love our neighbors as ourselves. His final assertion that everything taught in the Law of Moses and by the rest of the Old Testament prophets (hence the Law and the Prophets) was centered on these Two Commandments was both insightful and powerful. The Pharisees found themselves both rhetorically and theologically defeated. We find within these words the direction we need to live godly Christian lives.
A Christian’s primary concern, above all laws and customs and rules, is to love God. And how do we love God? While we could ague the metaphysical concepts around what love is and how we demonstrate such a feeling towards Deity, Jesus has given us a real world answer to how we both love God and demonstrate our love for God:
If you love me, obey my commandments.
John 14:15
The Greek word translated here as “obey” is tērēsete, and it means “keep, guard, observe.” It is used variously through the scriptures to mean everything from “observe/obey” to “guard over/keep safe.” Its choice here is instructive for how we show our love for God. We observe His commandments, obeying them as He directs. At the same time we also guard over them, we protect them from attack by those who would denigrate the commandments of God and we protect them from degradation through apostasy. Our love for God is shown through how we protect and follow the direction He has given us. No matter who or what is ordering us to ignore, alter, or break God’s commandments – whether they be friends, family, Presidents, Prime Ministers, kings, or potentates is irrelevant. Our loyalty, love, and obedience is to God alone.
Does this make us zealous, anti-social Crusaders then? No, because of the next Great Commandment – to love our neighbors as ourselves. And who is our neighbor, exactly? This question was put to Christ by an “expert in the law” (Luke 10:25, see footnote) and it elicited from Him the supernal Parable of the Good Samaritan. In short, a man is robbed and three people find him lying in a ditch afterwards. The first two, a priest and a Levite temple worker, pass by the man and leave him in his suffering. The third, a Samaritan, a hated foreigner, see the man and takes compassion on him, brings the wounded man to a nearby inn, and pays for his medical attention. After telling the parable, Jesus then asks:
So which of these three do you think was neighbor to him who fell among the thieves?”
And he [the expert] said, “He who showed mercy on him.”
Then Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
Luke 10:36-37
Who is our neighbor that we must love as our very Self? Any who we see suffering and in need. But who doesn’t suffer from some pain or grief, whether it be obvious or secret? Everyone does; we all suffer in this mortal life, our joys in parallel to our sorrows. Therefore all people are our neighbors whom we are to love and serve. When we see others in need it is not enough to be like the priest and the Levite, to pass over by the way and say some day I will try. We must act now. The actions of the priest and Levite are understandable. The injured man had been robbed and left to be seen. Stopping to help him may have given the robbers an opportunity for the next victim. The Samaritan was willing to risk suffering to save the injured man. We must do likewise. It is not enough to say that we will not throw stones at others. We must be willing to put ourselves in the way of the stones being cast at our brothers and sisters, to catch them with our hands and, if necessary, with our bodies as well.
We certainly cannot harm our brothers and sisters, our neighbors. Where they come from, what languages they speak, what they believe, whatever way we use to define ourselves are unimportant and irrelevant. Age, race, national origin, sex, faith, etc. – none of these things stop them from being our family and our neighbors. Therefore none of these negate the commandment that Christ has given us to see all people as our neighbor and to have mercy for them, pity for them, love for them, and to serve them in their needs.
Anything that would have us do otherwise – whether that be law, custom, or belief – would have us not merely break God’s commandments but, at best, turn us into the condemned priest and Levites in Christ’s parable, knowing better but not doing so. At worst these laws, customs, and beliefs would turn us into the robbers themselves, beating and killing our neighbors for our own perceived individual or social gain. When faced with such a choice – support/obey a law that violates a commandment of God or denounce/refuse to obey a law that violates the commandments of God – a Christian always knows where his loyalty lies. The Christian stands upon the First Great Commandment, to demonstrate our love for God by obeying and protecting His commandments no matter what.
Love Your Enemies
Recorded in Mathew 5-7 and given at the start of His public ministry, the Sermon on the Mount has been said to, “represent the major ideals of the Christian life” that teach “the characteristics of the true Christian.” The sermon covers topics ranging from divorce and fasting to prayer and salvation. Central to its message are a set of statements called the Beatitudes in Matthew 5: 3-10. Space prevents me from giving these verses the exegesis they deserve. Nevertheless, we can see from them what a Christian should be. A Christian should be humble, empathetic, meek, desire righteousness like a starving man desires food, be merciful, be pure in heart, and be a peacemaker.
Of note is the the Greek word in Matthew 5:9’s promise that peaceakers will be called the “sons of God.” The word translated as son in that phrase is huioi and it means “son, child (of either gender), [or] descendant (in any generation).” Here, in the words of Christ, we find further testimony that we are the literal children/descendants of God. As we try to develop these characteristics within our lives that we may qualify for the blessings promised to those who have them it can be a challenge what to do. The Sermon gives us further instruction how to cultivate these virtues, how to be honest, how to fast, how to pray, how to be chaste, how to make peace and overcome anger. Of cardinal importance in instructing us how to love are Christ’s words about how we should treat our enemies:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
Matthew 5:43-48
How are we to treat our enemies? We are to love them. If we only love and serve those who are nice to us, then how are we any different than the heathens, pagans, and idolaters of the world? Even the most brutal, violent, bloodthirsty tyrants of the world are nice to those who are nice to them. Christ is calling us to live at a higher, more heavenly level than that. In order to be perfect – or whole, mature, and complete – people then we must love our enemies. And that necessitates no merely saying that we love them, but actually treating them are you do all those you truly love. The Apostle Paul instructs us in exactly how we are to do this:
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight. Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” [Deut. 32:32] To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head.” [Proverbs 25:21-22] Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
Romans 12:14-21
What Paul is teaching here, Christ sums up in a single phrase:
Do to others as you would like them to do to you.
Luke 6:31 and Matthew 7:12
How should we respond to those who persecute us – who hate us, spit upon us, insult us, beat us, rob us, oppress us, even kill us? We are to bless them. We are to have an attitude of humility, not superiority. We are to live in peace, refusing to engage in the some kind of violence and aggression others do. We are not to avenge ourselves. When others attack us we refuse to attack them in response. For every act of hatred we respond with an act of love. We serve our enemies, asking God to bless them, feeding them and helping them in their needs – much like the Good Samaritan did the man he found robbed. For that is what we have found, not an enemy but someone so abused and twisted by the evils of the world that what he or she needs is to be ministered to, not struck down. If we refuse then we are no better than the priest and Levite who abandoned the robbed man to die.
Our service isn’t based on their actions or whether they are worthy of our service. It is our love that motivates us to treat others in the way that we wish to be treated. Because our motivations are based in the love of God and our love for our family, our spiritual brothers and sisters, the so-called worthiness, attitude, or actions of said person or people being serves is irrelevant. They may be grateful. They may spur it. In either case it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we are motivated to act from love not self-aggrandizement. We can neither be taken advantaged of or robbed because what we have we freely give. Just as Christ’s love is a free gift to all, so should ours be.
In doing so, in ministering to and loving our enemy and doing good to him even as he does evil to us, so we overcome evil with good, both by refusing to become the evils we reject by mimicking the evils we oppose and by showing forth the power of Christian love to transform others by showing how it has transformed us. We show how Christianity creates peace by showing how it has brought peace to us. by lying down our swords and refusing to lift them again we show the path by which all swords will be beaten into plowshares and the people of the world learn war no more. And in our unwillingness to act violently, hatefully, and vengefully toward others we reveal the injustice of their own actions toward us, something Christ understood and taught in Matthew 5 and which I will review in detail in How Can You Be A Good Christian? Part 2. There I will look at what Christ taught about how Christians can use love and methods of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience to empower oppressed people to confront and changed unjust social, legal, and political systems.
Final Thoughts
Here I will summarize the truths we have discovered thus far. All humans are the literal spirit children of God the Father. This is why He is called Father in the first place. In Christianity being American, Mexican, Canadian, Indian, Chinese, Australian, Iranian, Korean, Somalian, Nigerian, etc. is no where nearly important as the fact that all people are our literal spiritual brothers and sisters. We do not belong to the nations of the world but to the kingdom of God. The more we understand this, the more we allow the spirit of this truth to transform our understanding of the world, the more we understand our relationships to God and each other. We desire to demonstrate our love and loyalty to God and we do this by protecting, promoting, and defending His commandments, His religion. At the same time we desire to love our fellowman, our family, as ourselves.
We do this by giving them our loving service. When subjected to persecution, oppression, and violence we respond with charity, love, and service. Our goal is not to destroy our enemy but to save their soul and our responses, our actions, are not based upon what they do to us or others but what we believe and our efforts to try and live what we believe. Christians act, they do not react. The end result of all this is that we become powerful, not in the ways of the world which inevitably measures power in terms of swords and shield, bullets and bombs, but powerful in the ways of God, which measures such things in terms of obedience to God and love of others. The words of Aristides of Athens, an early Christian convert active around 117 AD, described the Christian life perfectly:
It is the Christians, O Emperor, who have sought and found the truth, for they acknowledge God. They do not keep for themselves the goods entrusted to them. They do not covet what belongs to others. They show love to their neighbours. They do not do to another what they would not wish to have done to themselves. They speak gently to those who oppress them, and in this way they make them their friends. It has become their passion to do good to their enemies. They live in the awareness of their smallness. Every one of them who has anything gives ungrudgingly to the one who has nothing. If they see a travelling stranger, they bring him under their roof. They rejoice over him as over a real brother, for they do not call one another brothers after the flesh, but they know they are brothers in the Spirit and in God. If they hear that one of them is imprisoned or oppressed for the sake of Christ, they take care of all his needs. If possible they set him free. If anyone among them is poor or comes into want while they themselves have nothing to spare, they fast two or three days for him. In this way they can supply any poor man with the food he needs. This, O Emperor, is the rule of life of the Christians, and this is their manner of life.
That is how we become not merely hearers, but doers in word and deed.
That is what manner of men and women we must be.
That is what it means to be a Christian.