The Divine Schoolmaster
8
For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives. It is for discipline that you have to endure. God is treating you as sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? . . . Besides this, we have had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? . . . He disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness.
— Hebrews 12:6–7, 9–10
Dropping to One Knee
The word “condescension” usually carries a negative connotation nowadays. In fact, the primary definition given by Merriam-Webster explains it as “the attitude or behavior of people who believe they are more intelligent or better than other people.” God, however, actually is better and more intelligent than we are, so, happily, the dictionary provides a more neutral explanation as well: “voluntary descent from one’s rank or dignity in relations with an inferior.” It’s a vertical figure of speech, really — the root word is “descent,” like a father dropping to one knee to communicate better with his small son or daughter.
Divine condescension, then, begins with Marcion’s remote, superexistent, cosmic God — but it doesn’t stay there. The greater a being is by nature, the more able it is to communicate itself, no matter how humble its hearers. The higher a being is, in fact, the more profound is its love, the greater its willingness to “drop to one knee.” This is divine condescension in a nutshell. And it’s a conception that will, if we ponder it long enough, take us far beyond God as judge, jailer, or even doctor. It will, at last, take us into a realm where the Eternal Mind is both able and willing to invite inferior beings to enter a personal relationship with itself and to empower them in such a way as to actually make this possible. Divine condescension can begin with a crude, ungrateful tribe of quasi-barbarians and end with a worldwide covenant family, the Father’s own true blood relations by virtue of their union to His Son, the man Christ Jesus. And the early stages of how this happened — the first millennium and a half of our redemption, in other words — are what is recorded in the pages of the Old Testament.
There’s a great deal more in those old books than just law. Here again is something Marcion missed. Yes, the Old Testament contains a record of how God used the Law to convince His people of the need for grace. But it also contains the record of how His people interacted with that Law, tried to understand the principles behind it, and what they learned about God in the process. It has been said that “Church history is theology teaching by example,” but this was true of God’s pre-Christian Church as well. In one sense, what we’re looking at is Israel’s priestly formation — a school story, in other words, about God’s kingdom of priests as they lived during their “seminary years.” And the way in which God’s acts in sacred history instructed, trained, and prepared His people for much greater truths in the age to come is perhaps the best answer to Marcion of all.
God’s Grade School
One point at which Marcion stumbled is still a stumbling block for many today. Most of us have heard Abraham called “the father of faith” and we’ve seen his children Jacob, Judah, and Joseph referred to as “Old Testament saints.” We naturally assume that these people are meant to be our religious role models (and that’s true — with a few qualifications). Yet even a very casual look at the book of Genesis shows that the behavior of these men was, in many ways, a good deal short of what you and I would call saintly. Abraham was a polygamist, who fathered children by three wives, two of whom were probably owned by him as slaves. Judah slept with a prostitute, who turned out to be his sister-in-law, and plotted, initially, to have her killed when she turned up pregnant. Even Joseph, later identified by the Church Fathers as a typological figure of Christ, was a bit of a tricky rascal and he married a pagan priestess. Are these really the kind of people Christianity offers as heroes?
What we may not be fully realizing as we make these judgments is how very long ago these heroes lived and how little they had really heard from God up to that point (certainly as compared with what we know now). Even in Marcion’s day, these stories about the patriarchs were very ancient. So the fact is, these early patriarchs might well be described as “God’s first-graders” — in Abraham’s case, a former Sumerian idol-worshipper. And just as we don’t expect first-graders to be able to answer eighth-grade questions, so we shouldn’t expect to find finished Christian saints at this stage of the game. What we look for is progress. Here’s another sense, then, in which the Law was “added”: if Genesis is first grade, then Exodus was second (though it did, as we have already seen, involve some remedial steps as well).
Returning, as we have throughout this book, to Galatians 3, we find that St. Paul himself was the first to use this “school story” metaphor: “Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed. So that the Law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith” (Gal. 3:23–24). Though it may sound, at first, as if the Apostle is using the image of a jailer again, the Greek word translated here as “custodian” more properly means a “disciplinarian” — or even a “tutor.” Paul, in fact, uses the same term elsewhere (1 Cor. 4:15) to refer to Christian mentors acting as counselors in the Church for recent converts. This usage, in turn, was derived from a common practice among well-to-do Roman fathers of the period. Such men often assigned an educated Greek slave to each of their sons as mentor and tutor from early childhood until maturity. Acting as the father’s proxy, these tutors supervised daily activities, protected their charges from danger, accompanied the youths to and from school, and even did a good portion of the teaching themselves. And slaves though they were, they were also deputized to apply the strap, if necessary, on the father’s behalf — teaching to the tune of a hickory stick, as the old song goes. In Paul’s eyes, the Mosaic Law exercised a similar role. Abraham and the other patriarchs had lived by faith alone, and faith, at that stage, was enough. Later, when the people had shown themselves stiff-necked and loath to sever their fond connections to sin and idolatry, the vexatious Second Law was added as disciplinarian, like the old-timey schoolmaster with his hickory. But just as with the Greek tutor, it was a job always intended to be temporary. As with any schoolteacher, the tutor’s ultimate aim was to render himself obsolete. Thus, when “faith came” once again with the advent of Christ, the custodian’s job was ended in order that we might be justified, as before, by faith.
First-grade lessons look silly in retrospect; an eighth-grader laughs at his old school books. But those lessons were, at the time, just as difficult to master as the later assignments. Likewise, later lessons often clarify and correct simpler figures of speech used in introductory courses. This, in part, is what Irenaeus and the other early commentators meant by “teaching economies” and “fitting precepts” tailored to Israel’s specific needs at different stages of its history. Origen, for example, the great third-century scholar, used this idea to explain those difficult biblical passages that seem to show God changing His mind, or repenting of some evil He had previously contemplated:
When divine providence [oikonoméō] is involved in human affairs, God assumes human intelligence, manners, and language. When we talk to a child of two we talk “baby talk” because he is a child, for as long as we maintain the character appropriate to an adult age, and speak to children without condescending to their language, it is impossible for children to comprehend. Now imagine a similar situation confronting God when he deals with humans especially those who are still “babes” [cf. 1 Cor. 3:1]. Notice too how we adults change the names of things for children, we have a special name for bread, and we call drinking by another name . . . and if we name clothes to children we give the clothes other names, as if we made up a special children’s language. Are we then immature because we do this? And if someone hears us speaking this way with children, would he say, “This old man is losing his mind, this man has forgotten that his beard has grown, that he is a grown-up?” Or is it permissible for the sake of accommodation, when speaking with a child not to speak the language of older and mature people but to converse in a child’s language? God surely speaks to children.165
Later, St. John Chrysostom summarized the idea memorably: “A teacher who is full of wisdom stammers along with his stammering young students. But the teacher’s stammering does not come from a lack of learning; it is a sign of the concern he feels for the children.”166
According to St. Basil the Great, it’s actually a strong affirmation of God’s cosmic incomprehensibility to look at things this way. The fullness of Divine Wisdom can, even during our own Christian dispensation, be glimpsed only “through a glass darkly” (see 1 Cor. 13:12) and, for mortals, only in small doses. If human-divine communications are going to happen at all, some element of divine condescension must of necessity be involved. Speaking of God’s covenant people as a whole, both before and after the coming of Christ, Basil treats us all as schoolchildren:
We were first taught elementary and earlier lessons, suited to our intelligence, while the Dispenser of our lots was ever leading us up, by gradually accustoming us, like eyes brought up in the dark, to the great light of truth. . . . For he spares our weakness and in the depth of the riches of his wisdom, and the inscrutable judgments of his intelligence, used this gentle treatment, fitted for our needs, gradually accustoming us to see first the shadows of objects, and to look at the sun in water, to save us from dashing against the spectacle of pure unadulterated light, and being blinded. Just so the Law, having a shadow of things to come, and the [typological] teachings of the prophets . . . have been devised as means to train the eyes of the heart, [so that later] the transition to “the wisdom hidden in mystery” [1 Cor. 2:7] will be made easy.167
Basil’s schoolmate Gregory Nazianzen also admired God’s crafty pedagogy:
“A crooked sapling will not bear a sudden bending the other way, or violence from the hand that would straighten it. . . . Therefore, like a tutor or physician, [God] partly removes and partly condones ancestral habits . . . for it is no easy matter to change from those habits which custom and use have made honorable.” Continuing, Gregory speaks of the First Law as having abolished idolatry . . . by permitting (unnecessary) sacrifices to Yahweh; of the Second Law, which permitted sacrifices, but arranged for their end by tying them to the fate of the Temple; and of the early Church’s toleration for circumcision, but then her eventual abrogation of it after the Jerusalem Council. Thus Abraham’s family gradually became “instead of Gentiles, Jews, and instead of Jews, Christians, being beguiled into the gospel by gradual changes.”168
Each change was good and appropriate for its time, and each stage represented all that the covenant people could have endured at that particular phase of their development. Theodoret, for instance, believed that if the Israelites had been given more advanced laws from the beginning, they would merely have reverted back to their original condition in Egypt. It was good school teaching that made the difference.
To look back on Abraham, then, and scorn his comparative ignorance or his still-pagan social attitudes is like the middle-schooler who mocks See Spot Run. Funny though it may be in retrospect, it was an indispensable step to the eighth grade, which is itself merely another step toward graduation. Moral strictness, as St. John Chrysostom was later to write, “must be judged against the standards of the day.”
The Rambam and Religion
This line of thought was not confined to Christians. When we reach the Middle Ages, we find that the greatest of the rabbis, Moses Maimonides,169 also explained the Law in terms of wise pedagogical principles. “It is,” he writes,
. . . impossible to go suddenly from one extreme to the other. . . . God sent Moses to make [the Israelites] a kingdom of priests and a holy nation by means of the knowledge of God. . . . But the custom which was in those days general among all men, and the general mode of worship in which the Israelites were brought up, consisted in sacrificing animals in those temples which contained certain images, to bow down to those images, and to burn incense before them. . . . It was in accordance with the wisdom and plan of God, as displayed in the whole Creation, that He did not command us to give up and to discontinue all these manners of service; for to obey such a commandment it would have been contrary to the nature of man, who generally cleaves to that to which he is used. . . . He transferred to His service that which had formerly served as a worship of created beings, and of things imaginary and unreal, and commanded us to serve Him in the same manner. . . . By this Divine plan it was effected that the traces of idolatry were blotted out, and the truly great principle of our faith, the Existence and Unity of God, was firmly established; this result was thus obtained without deterring or confusing the minds of the people by the abolition of the service to which they were accustomed and which alone was familiar to them.
Even though the rabbi’s purpose here is not to justify, as with our Christian commentators, the abandonment of the Deuteronomic Code, Maimonides does go on to affirm the principle of normative inversion in some detail, even using our comparison to the sacred cows of India. Anticipating trouble over this from his coreligionists, he defends his thesis, arguing that Scripture does indeed depict a God who adjusts His requirements to fit the changing needs of a developing people:
I know that you will at first thought reject this idea and find it strange; you will put the following question to me in your heart: How can we suppose that Divine commandments, prohibitions, and important acts, which are fully explained, and for which certain seasons are fixed, should not have been commanded for their own sake, but only for the sake of some other thing; as if they were only the means which He employed for His primary object? What prevented Him from making His primary object a direct commandment to us, and to give us the capacity of obeying it? . . .
Hear my answer, which will cure your heart of this disease and will show you the truth of that which I have pointed out to you. There occurs in the Law a passage which contains exactly the same idea; it is the following: “God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near; for God said, ‘Lest the people repent when they see war, and return to Egypt.’ But God led the people round by the way of the wilderness toward the Red Sea” [Exod. 13:17–18]. Here God led the people about, away from the direct road which He originally intended, because He feared they might meet on that way with hardships too great for their ordinary strength; He took them by another road in order to obtain thereby His original object. . . . It was the result of God’s wisdom that the Israelites were led about in the wilderness till they acquired courage. . . . In the same way the portion of the Law under discussion is the result of divine wisdom, according to which people are allowed to continue the kind of worship to which they have been accustomed, in order that they might acquire the true faith, which is the chief object [of God’s commandments].
You ask, What could have prevented God from commanding us directly, that which is the chief object, and from giving us the capacity of obeying it? This would lead to a second question, What prevented God from leading the Israelites through the way of the land of the Philistines, and endowing them with strength for fighting? The leading about by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night would then not have been necessary. A third question would then be asked in reference to the good promised as reward for the keeping of the commandments, and the evil foretold as a punishment for sins. It is the following question: As it is the chief object and purpose of God that we should believe in the Law, and act according to that which is written therein, why has He not given us the capacity of continually believing in it, and following its guidance, instead of holding out to us reward for obedience, and punishment for disobedience, or of actually giving all the predicted reward and punishment? For [the promises and the threats] are but the means of leading to this chief object. What prevented Him from giving us, as part of our nature, the will to do that which He desires us to do, and to abandon the kind of worship which He rejects?
These are, essentially, questions about why God bothers to use a process of religious formation at all. Why not simply create Himself a kingdom of priests ex nihilo — out of nothing — as He is perfectly capable of doing? Maimonides responds:
Although in every one of the signs [related in Scripture] the natural property of some individual being is changed, the nature of man is never changed by God by way of miracle. It is in accordance with this important principle that God said, “O that there were such a heart in them, that they would fear me,” etc. (Deut. 5:26). It is also for this reason that He distinctly stated the commandments and the prohibitions, the reward and the punishment. . . . I do not say this because I believe that it is difficult for God to change the nature of every individual person; on the contrary, it is possible, and it is in His power, according to the principles taught in Scripture; but it has never been His will to do it, and it never will be. If it were part of His will to change [by Divine fiat] the nature of any person, the mission of prophets and the giving of the Law would have been altogether superfluous.170
Maimonides rightly stresses that our heavenly Father is not looking for mere compliance, based on compulsion; He wants us to enter and enjoy a family relationship based on trust and covenant love. And since it was His sovereign will to raise up this family from very unpromising beginnings — from among pagans and idolators, who did not, to begin with, “know their right hand from their left” (Jonah 4:11) — some process of divine schooling was going to prove absolutely necessary.
The Suffering Son of Man
Yet isn’t this just what our modern Marcionites guessed from the beginning — that Judeo-Christian believers must have “progressed” eventually past all of their crude tribal laws and barbaric taboos? How is that conception so different from what we’re proposing here?
The difference, to put it shortly, is the difference between gradually getting cleverer on your own, as a natural result of your own superior smarts, and a guided process of revealed truths overseen by the Divine Author of the Universe. Justin or Irenaeus, for instance, might well have agreed that Moses’ Law enforced an infuriatingly drawn-out set of pettifogging dictums. They would simultaneously have insisted, however, that every one of those Laws, each and every stage of this process, was God’s own will . . . for the time being. Progress in the secular sense is self-guided; but “the Law acting as schoolmaster, leading us to Christ” expresses an actual relationship with a real Person. The early stages of it, likewise, don’t so much represent crude human fumblings after God as they do God’s own rescue mission in search of man.
What we’re watching in the pages of the Old Testament is a story of descent and then ascent. First, God acts miraculously in history, stooping to conquer the hearts of a people who, at times, have to be externally provided with the very desire to want saving anymore. And this, as we’ve seen, often involved meeting them halfway — “winking,” as it were, at some pretty grievous faults for a while, rather than holding out for a better class of students lest He dirty His hands. This movement is, on God’s part, one of descent: divine condescension. Then, when He has won their hearts through trust, God begins to raise the people to His own level, a long process of ascent, like a rescue diver returning to the surface with a swimmer in danger of drowning. Israel was drowning, as it were, in sin and idolatry: God descends in His mercy, then ascends as Savior. Similarly, a wise schoolmaster descends to “baby talk” when teaching first-graders and then gradually ascends once more to his natural, adult manner of speech — carrying his students with him.
Yes, the Old Testament contains the “dispensation of condemnation,” but we mustn’t forget that it also schools God’s chosen people to appreciate Christ when He finally does come. The same vexatious Legislation that caused the people to cry out for “the New Moses” also gave them the tools to recognize Him when He appeared. Justin, Tertullian, and Irenaeus all make long catalogues of the Old Testament prophecies destined to be fulfilled in Christ; and also of the ways in which the Church He founded — the new, enlarged “spiritual Israel” — embodies the New Covenant declared by Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the other prophets. “Moreover,” adds Justin, “by the works and by the attendant miracles, it is possible for all to understand that He is the new law, and the new covenant, and the expectation of those who out of every people wait for the good things of God.” Irenaeus completes this thought: “Since, then, life has been given us through this calling, and God has restored again in us Abraham’s faith in Him, we should no more turn back, I mean, to the former legislation. . . . We have no [further] need of the law as pedagogue.”171
Recall, too, that this wasn’t just any old school we’ve been speaking of — it was a seminary. God’s people were being trained for a priestly role, to act as His ambassadors, mediating His salvation to a lost world — and being trained by God Himself. This is a very deep idea, not least because mentoring always tends to mark a student with the characteristics of his or her teacher. Just as an apprentice can usually be recognized as the pupil of a particular Master, so Israel’s long tutelage in the school of Almighty God begins to make its mark upon their national character — a mark that grows more distinct, even more literal, as time goes on.
God gave us advance notice of this process right at the start. At the very beginning of the Exodus, He declared to Moses, “Israel is my first-born son” (Exod. 4:22) — a really breathtaking statement, if you stop to think about it. Israel is God’s son. Yahweh’s covenant identification with the people is already so strong that it amounts to a family resemblance, an earthly icon of His unseen attributes. After the Passover in Egypt, the nation’s own firstborn sons become a more specific incarnation of this vocation, serving as “priests to the priesthood,” so to speak, at the head of their own families. This, in turn, was an image of Israel’s larger role in the world, called to be “elder brother” to all the nations of the earth, God’s “first fruits” from among the wreck of fallen humanity.
Yet God’s mentoring is not always easy or even pleasant. Indeed, as any of our own Catholic shepherds will tell you, the priesthood itself is no bed of roses. A priest voluntarily undertakes extra suffering for the sake of his flock; he condescends to spend himself on their behalf. This is why Jonah, for instance, preferred to “play hooky” for a while from God’s school of hard knocks — and, like many similar truants, decided to go fishing instead (he made, as you may remember, a big catch — or was it the other way around?). Jonah stands here as a symbol for Israel, a “chosen people” now beginning to realize that they’ve been chosen, mainly, for a good deal of extra trouble. Other prophets emphasize this theme strongly: Israel’s special role means that Israel will act the part of a suffering savior on humanity’s behalf.
The prophet Daniel, for instance, makes Israel not only God’s son but the son of man, as well — a kind of second Adam destined to undo the sin of the first and inherit “power, and glory, and a kingdom” (Dan. 7:13–14). Isaiah sings four famous “servant songs,” which, as Origen records, “bore reference to the whole [Jewish] people, regarded as one individual, and as being in a state of dispersion and suffering, in order that many proselytes might be gained, on account of the dispersion of the Jews among numerous heathen nations.”172 The culmination of this four-song cycle (Isaiah 53) grows so specific and individualized, however, that it becomes difficult to tell whether the author intends any longer to depict the nation or a literal man. In fact, it almost seems as if God’s son Israel will, like his father, have a son himself one day.
Literal messiahs have, after all, begun to come already. Just as the Old Covenant Scriptures contain more than one covenant, so the Bible records a whole succession of “suffering saviors” prior to the One who will eventually wear that title par excellence. We’ve already noted the way in which Moses served as both mediator and deliverer during the Exodus. Other figures — such as Joshua and Samson — acted the part in various ways as well. By the time we get to David, however, the signs become downright unmistakable; the prefigurings have grown more specific, the fulfillments less allegorical. The books of Chronicles depict him as a new Melchizedek, founder of a royal priesthood that almost seems destined to supplant the tiresome Levitical order someday. He initiates a new line of kings as well, the restoration, apparently, of the original father-son priesthood seen in the pages of the Pentateuch but forfeited after the golden calf and Beth-peor. And just like the covenants with the patriarchs, this new Davidic monarchy is declared to be “perpetual” and “for evermore” — passed down eternally via David’s family. The original Jerusalem temple was built during this period, and God pledges that “My heart will be there for all time” (2 Chron. 7:15–16). Psalm 89 goes so far as to inform us that God will make David’s son “the first-born, the highest of the kings on earth” (v. 27). “Highest” in this verse is a translation of the Hebrew word elyon — a term used elsewhere as one of God’s own titles.
And yet, as a sad matter of fact, David’s kingdom lasts only two generations before collapsing into chaos and civil war. His new dynasty quickly begets a large crop of truly terrible kings, tyrannical and idolatrous, the very opposite, it would seem, of Messianic. Instead of fulfilling Israel’s hopes, “God’s sons” seem only to have left them in darkness. Eventually, the Davidic line simply peters out — with good riddance, as far as many Israelites were concerned. It would seem that the scepter promised to Judah’s family has passed away after all. The lost monarchy becomes little more than a legend, a folktale about a true king in hiding someplace, like Professor Tolkien’s Aragorn. So what now? As in the days when Abraham’s family had become a nation of idol worshippers in Egypt, God’s promise to bless all the world through them seems laughable, impossible. Has it all come to nothing? Is this the time to give in?
Actually, this was the time for testing — for God’s final exam, so to speak. The Divine Schoolmaster has done centuries of patient work. Now He will step aside, like the earthly father who steps away from the bicycle, and see whether his son is ready to ride solo. Now, an element of suspense comes into our school story. Similar exams, after all, had been failed in the past, with setbacks that delayed graduation for centuries. Abraham, to whom God had promised descendants as numerous as the stars, did wait patiently for a while, married to a ninety-year-old woman, but finally took action on his own, siring an heir through Hagar rather than Sarah. Most notoriously, the children of Israel, anxious and fearful, made a calf in which to trust when Moses took too long to come down from the mountain. So here, feeling vulnerable and surrounded by hostile enemies, Israel’s bewildered leaders begin contemplating new, doubtful alliances with foreign powers in lieu of David’s missing heir — pagan powers, of course, with idols to worship.
Will things be different this time? Has Israel — tutored now for a thousand years by Yahweh Himself — learned its lesson at last?
He Came Down from Heaven
There’s an old rabbinical tradition to the effect that the Messiah would come only to either a perfectly righteous or a perfectly unrighteous generation.
In reality, He came to neither, but to a people who, like David, had become brokenhearted and contrite — but whose faith was stronger than it ever had been. He came, in other words, to a people who had passed their final, a priestly nation at last becoming worthy of the name, who were found still hoping when hope was gone.
The very books, in fact, that so magnified the Davidic monarchy and insisted so strongly on its perpetuity (the books of Chronicles) were written after that line of kings had already failed. “Yet the Lord would not destroy the house of David,” the chronicler promises, “because of the covenant which he had made with David, and since he had promised to give a lamp to him and to his sons for ever” (2 Chron. 21:7). Have David’s literal sons proved a washout? Perhaps they have. Even so, Yahweh is faithful and has proved Himself again and again, no matter what. If a son of David is to rule, then a Son of David we must continue to expect. Hopeless situations are now just one more test — just another chance for a miracle.
The people survived a brutal exile in Babylon on this hope. They ceased, at last, to run after idols. They refounded Jerusalem, rebuilt Solomon’s temple, gathered up all the Old Testament books for the first time — and searched them for prophetic clues. “Behold,” wrote Jeremiah, “the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell securely. And this is the name by which he will be called: ‘The Lord is our righteousness’ ” (Jer. 23:5–6). “On that day,” continues Zechariah, “the house of David shall be like God, like the angel of the Lord, at their head. . . And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of compassion and supplication, so that, when they look on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a first-born” (Zech. 12:8, 10). Isaiah speaks most plainly of all, types and shadows beginning to cease, metaphors about to become real: “There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse [David’s father], and a branch shall grow out of his roots. And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord” (Isa. 11:1). “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” — a word that, as the Evangelist will later point out, “means, God with us” (Isa. 7:14; Matt 1:23). The Schoolmaster’s lessons have been learned. The Divine Cardiologist is readying himself for surgery. God’s pattern of dealing in the past has pointed the way to an astounding new covenant intimacy in the future.
In Jesus Christ, God’s Son became literal — literally a Son (or descendant) of David and literally God’s own Son. As the angel said to His blessed mother: “Do not be afraid, Mary; you have found favor with God. You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you are to call him Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever; his kingdom will never end” (see Luke 1:30–33). Jesus is our two metaphors made flesh — both the Great Physician and Rabboni, our teacher. The Divine Pedagogue literally makes a personal appearance on earth, a mind-boggling conception, to say the least. Yet as Jesus Himself warned doubters, “Stop grumbling among yourselves. . . . It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God’ ” (John 6:43, 45).
The Incarnation of the coeternal Second Person of the Holy Trinity is the ultimate example of divine condescension. As St. Paul wrote to the Philippians: “Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even a death on the cross” (Phil. 2:5–8). St. John, an eyewitness to this supreme act of accommodation, was still staggering over it many years later. Recounting the experience in one of his epistles, John begins with Philo’s Divine Logos — “that which was from the beginning” — but ends with the God John knew personally, with whom he once walked in the hills of Galilee, just as Adam and Eve had walked with Him in paradise. “That which was from the beginning, which we [the Apostles] have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life — that life was made manifest, and we saw it, and testify to it, and proclaim to you the eternal life which was with the Father and was made manifest to us” (1 John 1:1–2).
Jesus Christ is God’s love made manifest; visible, that is, to the naked eye. “He is the image of the invisible God,” writes St. Paul, “the first-born of all creation. . . . For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (Col. 1:15, 19–20). Does Marcion balk at Israel’s “anthropomorphic” God — too willing to meet sinners halfway? The Catholic Church rejoices to affirm that God actually became an anthropoid — not just in appearance but as a permanent fact! “He came down from heaven,” as we say in the Creed, “. . . and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.” Thus the Incarnation shows the true depths of covenant love. “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9). Stooping to conquer our hearts, God became man, so that men could become one with God.
The Incarnation is the ultimate answer to the Judaziers as well. “The Law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God through faith” (Gal. 3:25–26). To the rulers of Israel — those who rejected the Savior during His earthly ministry, preferring to stick with Moses and pin their hopes on the Law — Jesus Himself spoke thus: “The Father who has sent me has himself borne witness to me. . . . You search the Scriptures, because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they who bear witness to me; yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. . . . Do not think that I shall accuse you to the Father; it is Moses who accuses you, on whom you set your hope. If you believed Moses, you would have believed me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you receive my words?” (John 5:37–47). It seems the Dispensation of Condemnation had not yet worked its magic on everyone. The Prophet “like unto Moses” has now arrived, but, for some, the old wine was still better. Yet, as the Gospels also tell us, “the common people heard him gladly” (see Mark 12:37) — people like Simeon, “righteous and devout . . . waiting for the consolation of Israel” (Luke 2:25), or Anna the prophetess, who “did not depart from the temple, worshiping with fasting and prayer night and day” and “spoke of [Jesus] to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem” (Luke 2:37–38). Graduated, now, from God’s seminary, these were the kind of priests Yahweh had been striving to create all along.
Any Plan Necessary
That priesthood has now been passed down to us as well. Christ, our High Priest, has deputized the Christian faithful, too, as St. Peter makes clear in his first epistle. Writing to all of us — to “you have tasted the kindness of the Lord” — Peter calls every single Christian believer to answer this great vocation: “Come to him . . . and like living stones be yourselves built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. . . . You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet. 2:3–5, 9). This universal priesthood of all believers in no way precludes the validity of a specially ordained class of sacrificing priests as well, any more than it did under the Old Covenant. Indeed, several of the early Fathers continue to refer to Christian priests, metaphorically, as “Levites” well into the third century. But we laypeople must never neglect the vocation all of us have received just as surely as our shepherds. Like them, we are called to spend ourselves on behalf of others, to make an offering of our lives. Through baptism, we have all been called to act on behalf of our great High Priest. Whether we evangelize our neighbors, help them in times of bodily need, or simply show forth God’s love and justice by our kindness or fairness, we are acting in persona Christi, as it were — as icons of Jesus Christ. In this regard, we are also called to imitate God’s loving condescension, His willingness to accommodate man’s frailty and halting half steps; as St. Paul puts it:
To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. . . . To those outside the law I became as one outside the law — not being without law toward God but under the law of Christ — that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings. (1 Cor. 9:19–23)
It’s precisely because we have been ordained as priests of a New Covenant that we must learn to recognize the passing of the Old — to recognize that its special “marching orders” have been made obsolete, but also to recognize it in the honorific sense. We’re called to commemorate the Old Testament era as one might recognize the heroes of the American Revolution, for example, or commemorate victory over fascism in World War II. This is the story of how our nation was founded and how it was saved, through periods of great trial and tribulation — God’s holy nation, His Covenant Family. But just as insisting upon the permanent validity of the Mosaic covenant implied that no New Moses would ever be necessary, so continued reliance upon the Second Legislation once the New Moses has come implies his irrelevance as well. The Old Testament ceremonials contained the promise of a Christ to come; that’s why continuing to keep them is to call out for that Christ as if He were still far off. Ritual images must cease when the things the ritual foreshadowed have arrived.
This is why the Apostles insisted upon the end of the Old Law — and enforced that end in the churches, even for Jewish Christians eventually. Recalling Peter’s vision of the descending sheet — “What God has made clean you shall not call common” (Acts 11:9) — the New Testament writers spell out the terms of the new dispensation very clearly. In his Epistle to the Romans, Paul reminds us that “You are not under the law but grace. . . . The end of the Law is Christ” (see 6:14, 10:4). To Titus he writes, “To the pure all things are pure,” and to the Galatians, “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is of any avail, but faith working through love” (Titus 1:15; Gal. 5:6). St. Mark the Evangelist, after relating one of Christ’s parables concerning the things that do and do not defile a man, sums the point up very simply: “Thus he declared all foods clean” (7:19). Since the Church is intended, by nature, to be an international family that includes Jews but does not exclude anyone, the rules intended solely for Jews must now stand aside. All these were but indistinct, blurry outlines of the things to come, “but the substance belongs to Christ” (Col. 2:17).
We don’t, however, ban the Old Testament because of this, as Marcion would. Indeed, the Old Testament writings are indispensable to our understanding of the New. “These signs remain for Christians,” as St. Augustine puts it, “but only to be read.” And read they still are, of course, from all the pulpits in Christendom; arranged, especially in Catholic lectionaries, in a thematically coordinated way, so that we may always be reading the New in the light of the Old, and the Old in the light of the New. The Catholic Church, as Tertullian puts it, “unites in one volume the law and the prophets with the writings of evangelists and apostles, from which she drinks her faith.”173
In this way, we can say that St. Justin’s work was an unqualified success. Not only did he and his school succeed in driving both the Judaizing and Marcionizing errors out of the Catholic Church (though they do, sadly, attempt a comeback from time to time), but he also showed that it is actually the unity of God’s plan that explains its surface discontinuities.
Concerning this New Covenant, God spoke through Jeremiah thus: “Behold the days will come, says the Lord, and I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: it will not be like the covenant which I made with their fathers, in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt” [Jer. 31:31–32]. If, therefore, God predicted that He would make a new covenant, and this for a light to the nations, and we see and are convinced that, through the name of the crucified Jesus Christ, men have turned to God, leaving behind them idolatry and other sinful practices, and have kept the faith and have practiced piety even unto death, then everyone can clearly see from these deeds and the accompanying powerful miracles that He is indeed the New Law, the new covenant, and the expectation of those who, from every nation, have awaited the blessings of God. We have been led to God through this crucified Christ, and we are the true spiritual Israel, and the descendants of Judah, Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham, who, though uncircumcised, was approved and blessed by God because of his faith and was called the father of many nations. (11)
God has always had one plan: to use any plan necessary to save His family, no matter what the circumstance. Like St. Paul His Apostle, God has, throughout history “become all things to all men, in order by any means to save some.” The whole goal from the beginning, then, now stands fully revealed. The multitude of covenants that Scripture displays, so discontinuous to the casual reader, are, in truth, nothing less than God’s unfolding plan to restore the paradise lost with Adam’s sin, a paradise of full, intimate communion between God and man.
165 Origen, Homilies sur Jeremie 238, quoted in Benin, Footprints of God, 13.
166 John Chrysostom, On the Incomprehensible 3, 4, quoted in Benin, Footprints of God, 70.
167 Basil, De Spiritu Sancto, 14, 33, quoted in Benin, Footprints of God, 37.
168 Gregory Nazianzus, Oration 31, 25, quoted in Benin, Footprints of God, 42.
169 Moses Maimonides, also known by the acronym Rambam, was a Sephardic Jewish philosopher and perhaps the single most influential Torah scholar of the medieval period.
170 All Maimonides references are from The Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedlander (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), chaps. 31–33.
171 Irenaeus, Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, in Ancient Christian Writers, 16:102.
172 Origen, Against Celsus 1, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 4, trans. Frederick Crombie, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1885), 55.
173 Tertullian, Prescription against the Heretics, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, 3:35.