Note: This is an extended excerpt of chapter 1 of Life in Christ. This is available to all subscribers (free and paid), as an opportunity to become acquainted with Fr Harton’s devotional writing.
After today, only the first paragraph of the subsequent excerpts will be available free subscribers. To read the rest you will have to become a paid subscriber. Do so now!
CHAPTER 1: SONS OF GOD (part 1)
Beloved, now are we the sons of God — 1 John iii. 2.
If we are truly to understand what sort of life it is that, as Christians, we should lead, we must first of all inquire what it is that, as Christians, we are. Christian spirituality rests upon the fact that when God makes human beings members of His Church in Holy Baptism He not only admits them into a society of men, but also makes a radical change in their very selves, so that it may truly be said that “if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature,’ (2 Cor. v. 17.) or, as the Revised Version margin reads even more cogently, “there is a new creation.” Holy Baptism is not only the doing away of sin so that the baptized may be able to make a fresh start, though it is that, it is a renewal of so radical a kind that it can be described as a new creation a making again. S. Paul emphasizes this newness in many places, and it is characteristic of the religion of the New Testament, but it is singularly little realized to-day: hence much of the weakness of contemporary Christianity.
In Christianity we find more than a new revelation of God, a new forgiveness, a new ethic, an new Example; in the Church more than an aggregation of believers. In the symbolism of Holy Baptism S. Paul (Rom. vi. 3 ff.; Col. iii. 1-3) sees not only “a death unto sin,” but still more “newness of life,” comparable to and consequent upon the risen life of our Lord; a new life of a new being.
What are we then, we new creatures in Christ Jesus? S. John gives us the answer in a sentence. “Beloved,” he says, “now are we the sons of God.” That and nothing less than that.
He places first the little word “now.” This implies that we are something now, as Christians, which we were not before. There is a sense in which it is true to say that all men are the children of God and not Christians only; He created all, He loves all. He created all for Himself and desires that all should enter into the fullness of sonship; nevertheless, all men are not sons in the full sense of the word, and they can only become to through union with the Eternal Son. The Christian is a son of God in the fullest sense of the term, and he is so by virtue of the gift of God in Baptism.
Further, S. John’s “now” implies that we all, even the newly-baptized infant, really are sons of God. The Apostle refuses to speculate about our future state, “it is not yet made manifest what we shall be.” One thing he knows, that we are now sons of God. We are not given merely the possibility of sonship in heaven, we do not have sonship set before us as the goal which we seek to attain on earth (our goal is something different from that), but we are sons here and now, and all our life is changed by that fact.
It was to make us sons of God that our Lord Jesus Christ was born of Blessed Mary in Bethlehem. That was the end and purpose of the Incarnation. S. Athanasius puts the matter crisply when he says, “The Son of God become son of man that the sons of man, that is to say of Adam, might become sons of God” (On the Incarnation, 8). That is not merely an epigram, it is the enunciation of a fundamental truth. Our Lord did not come into this world in order to help us, He came to make us sons of God; that alone was the full purpose of His coming, as S. John says in the Prologue of his Gospel, “As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on His Name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (S. John i. 12-13).
If, then, we are sons of God through Christ we must try and understand what our sonship means, for we do not necessarily understand an idea when we perceive that it is true. For the beginnings of this understanding we must go to S. Paul. “When the fullness of the time was come,” he says, “God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive adoption as sons” (Gal. iv. 4-5). Several important truths are contained in that short sentence, but we are now concerned with only one of them, indeed with one word, “adoption.” Our Lord Jesus Christ is the Eternal Son of God because He is of the same nature as the Father, Very God of Very God, but we are not like that; we are not God, and never can be (to believe otherwise is to fall into the heresy of Pantheism); we are creatures of God, wonderful indeed, but finite and quite other than divine, dependent for our being and our life upon the will of Him Who made us. Moreover, we are not only creatures but fallen creatures, and our original likeness to our Creator is grievously smirched with sin. How can such beings be, in any true sense, the sons of God? Obviously our sonship must be the result of divine intervention, and that of a very special kind; it is this intervention which S. Paul explains by the term “adoption.”