Letter to Diognetus -- Part 2

Since I see, most excellent Diognetus, that you are most interested in learning about the religion of the Christians, and are asking very clear and careful questions about them.....and why has this new race of humans or way of life come into the world we live in now and not before----I gladly welcome this interest of yours.....

So begins the anonymous author of the Letter to Diognetus, written toward the end of the second century or the beginning of the third.  In the last entry, I quoted the writer's description of Christians in their respective cultures.  The author then goes on to compare Christians in the world to the role of the soul in the body:

In a word, what the soul is to the body, Christians are to the world.  The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians throughout the cities of the world.  The soul dwells in the body, but is not of the body.  Likewise, Christians dwell in the world, but are not of the world.  The soul, which is invisible, is confined in the body, which is visible; in the same way, Christians are recognized as being in the world, and yet their religion remains invisible.

The flesh hates the soul, and wages war against it, even though it has suffered no wrong, because it is hindered from indulging in its pleasures, so also the world hates the Christians, even though it has suffered no wrong, because they set themselves against its pleasures.  The soul loves the flesh that hates it, and its members, and Christians love those who hate them.

The soul is enclosed in the body, but it holds the body together; and though Christians are detained in the world as if in a prison, they in fact hold the world together.  The soul, which is immortal, lives in a mortal dwelling; similarly, Christians live as strangers amidst perishable things, while waiting for the imperishable in heaven.

The soul, when poorly treated with respect to food and drink, becomes all the better; and so Christians when punished daily increase more and more.  Such is the important position to which God has appointed them, and it is not right for them to decline it.

For this is, as I have said, no earthly discovery that was committed to them, nor some mortal idea that they consider to be worth guarding so carefully, nor have they been entrusted with the administration of merely human mysteries.  On the contrary, the omnipotent Creator of all, the invisible God himself, established among humans the truth and the holy, incomprehensible, word from heaven and fixed it firmly in their hearts, not, as one might imagine, by sending to people some subordinate, or angel, or ruler or one of those who manage earthly matters......but the Designer and Creator of the universe itself...-- this one he sent to them!
 
....He sent him in gentleness and meekness, as a king might send his son who is a king; he sent him as God; he sent him as a human to humans.  When He sent Him, He did so as one who saves by persuasion, not compulsion, for compulsion is no attribute of God.....Do you not see how they are thrown to wild beasts to make them deny the Lord, and yet are not conquered?  Do you not see that as more of them are punished, the more others increase?  These things do not look like the works of a human; they are the power of God, they are proofs of His Presence....

No one has either seen or recognized him, but he has revealed himself.  And he revealed himself through faith, which is the only means by which it is permitted to see God.

C.S. Lewis writes often about "chronological snobbery," whereby we in the 21st century, inheritors of the 17th-century Enlightenment, believe that we are smarter, wiser, more scientific, etc. than all those who have gone before us.  We believe that the only guide to truth is our own ideas and experiences.  But there is so much wisdom and inspiration to be found in those who have gone before us, if we would only avail ourselves of it.  We cannot read Scripture in a vacuum; if we are to receive the revelation of God, we must be humble enough to read it through the eyes of the early Christians, as well as through our own experience and that of others down through the ages.