Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church

Being Christian makes a difference in who we are and how we live.

Being Christian places us in the kingdom of Jesus, which, He says, is not of this world (John 18:36). Its citizens, said the apostle Paul, would not copy the “behaviour and customs of this world” (Romans 12:2, NLT).

Another apostle, Peter, called Christians a “chosen people,” a “holy nation.” “Once you had no identity as a people; now you are God’s people.” Christians are “temporary residents and foreigners” in the world and needed to live lives honouring God (1 Peter 2:9-11, NLT).

How did this work in reality? About 100 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus, an Athenian Christian, Aristides, wrote that Christians were a nation in their own right. For “nation,” he used the word ethnos (from which we get “ethnic”).

Christians were obviously not a nation in the way Romans, Greeks or Assyrians were. Yet Aristides doesn’t argue the case, he assumes his readers will agree. And it seems they did because opponents of Christianity often ridiculed them as a “third race”—meaning they were neither Greek nor barbarian.

“When Aristides compared Christianity with ethne like the Greeks, Babylonians, Egyptians, and Jews,” says Wayne Meeks (The Origins of Christian Morality), “he implied that becoming a Christian meant something like the experience of an immigrant who leaves his or her native land and assimilates to the culture of a new, adopted homeland.”

Being Christian back then meant being counterculture in things such as recognising equality in human worth between slave and slave owner, and male and female; risking their health to help the sick; and, at times, risking their lives and livelihood to be a Jesus follower.

Being Christian then meant rejecting a world sold on pleasure; where the strong were rewarded and the weak discarded; and where superstitions were rampant.

Has anything changed?

Dr Bruce Manners
Senior minister
Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church

War. This is a “big and sprawling word that brings a lot of human suffering into the conversation.” That’s how journalist Sebastian Junger describes it in his book War (2010).

Junger spent months embedded with US forces in Afghanistan. He joined Battle Company in what is considered the most dangerous outpost in the country. An excellent writer (he wrote The Perfect Storm), he tries to understand what makes these soldiers do what they do.

He’s awed by the firepower these soldiers have at their disposal. He tells of the shoulder-fired Javelin rocket that can be steered through the window of a car three kilometres away. “Each Javelin costs $US80,000, and the idea that it’s fired by a guy who doesn’t make that in a year at a guy who doesn’t make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous. . . .”

He’s surprised to discover soldiers hooked on combat. It comes from the adrenalin rush of battle. They feel most alive when fighting the enemy, life on the line. “Combat is the smaller game [in war] that young men fall in love with.”

But it’s more than combat adrenalin. There’s what Junger calls the “profound and mysterious gratification to the reciprocal agreement to protect another person with your life.”

He asks Cortez, a soldier, about risking his life for others in his platoon.

“‘I’d actually throw myself on the hand grenade for them,’ he said. I asked him why.

“‘Because I actually love my brothers,’ he said. ‘I mean, it’s a brotherhood. Being able to save their life so they can live, I think is rewarding. Any of them would do it for me.’”

Love. That’s not a word you often find in war, but it certainly fits being willing to lose your life to save someone else.

And it’s also a God thing. Although God went the second mile when Jesus died for His enemies (see Romans 5:6-8).