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?
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