Strangers in Every Country

I can see, most excellent Diognetus, how very eager you are to learn about the way Christians worship God, and how carefully and precisely you are asking about them: what God they trust in and how they worship him, so that they all look down on the world and think nothing of death; how they neither count as gods the ones the Greeks reckon gods nor keep the superstition of the Jews; what sort of affection they have for one another; and why on earth this new race, or new practice, has come into the world now and not before. I welcome this eagerness of yours, and I ask God — the one who supplies us both with the speaking and the hearing — to grant me to speak in such a way that you are the better for hearing it, and to grant you to hear in such a way that the one who spoke has nothing to regret. [a]

Come, then. Clear your mind of every idea that has hold of it, throw off the habit that has been deceiving you, and become a new man, as if you were starting again from the beginning — since, as you admitted yourself, you are going to be the hearer of a new teaching. Look, not only with your eyes but with your mind, and see what substance and what shape they have, these things you call gods and take for gods. [d]

Is not one of them stone, like the stone we walk on? Another bronze, no better than the pots hammered out for our own use? Another wood, and already rotting? Another silver, needing a man to guard it so it is not stolen? Another iron, eaten away with rust? Another clay, no more presentable than what is made for the filthiest use? Are they not all made of perishable stuff? Were they not beaten out with iron and fire? Did not a stonecutter make one, a coppersmith another, a silversmith another, a potter another? Before the crafts of these men stamped them into the shapes they have now, was each of them not in some other shape — as, even now, each still is? Would not the vessels made now out of the same material turn into things like these, if they fell into the same craftsmen’s hands? And could not these things you now bow down to be turned by men back into vessels like all the rest? Are they not all deaf? Blind? Without a soul? Without feeling? Unable to move? Are they not all rotting? All decaying?

These you call gods. These you serve like slaves. These you bow down to — and in the end you make yourselves exactly like them. Is this why you hate Christians, because they do not count these things as gods? And yet you, who think and suppose you are praising them, are you not despising them far more? Are you not mocking and insulting them far more, when you worship the ones made of stone and clay without setting any guard on them, but lock up the silver and gold ones at night and post watchmen over them by day so they will not be stolen? And the honors you think you are offering them: if they can feel, you are punishing them; and if they cannot feel, you show it up by worshipping them with blood and the reek of burning fat.

Let one of you put up with that. Let one of you stand having it done to him. Not one human being will willingly put up with that punishment, because he has feeling and reason; but the stone puts up with it, because it feels nothing. So are you not proving that it cannot feel? About Christians not being slaves to gods like these I could say much more; but if what has been said does not seem enough to somebody, I think it is pointless to say any more.

Next, I imagine, you are especially longing to hear why they do not worship God the way the Jews do. Now the Jews: so far as they keep away from the kind of service I have just described, they are right to think it proper to reverence one God, the God of all things and their Master. But so far as they bring him worship in the same style as those others, they go badly wrong. For the very things the Greeks offer to what cannot feel or hear — and so put their folly on display — these people reckon they are handing to God as though he needed them; and one would more reasonably call that stupidity than worship. For the one who made heaven and earth and everything in them, and who supplies us all with whatever we need, cannot himself be in need of any of the things he is supplying to the people who imagine they are giving them to him. And those who think they are carrying out sacrifices to him with blood and burning fat and whole burnt offerings, and honoring him with such honors — they seem to me no different from the men who lavish the same attention on deaf things. The one group gives to what cannot take any share of the honor; the other gives to the one who is in need of nothing. [g]

As for their squeamishness about food, their superstition about sabbaths, their bragging about circumcision, and their playacting over fasts and new moons — laughable things, not worth a word — I do not think you need to learn about that from me. To take some of the things God created for people to use and accept them as well made, and to refuse others as useless and unnecessary — how is that not lawless? To lie about God, as though he forbade doing anything good on the sabbath day — how is that not irreverent? To boast that the cutting away of flesh is proof of being chosen, as if that made them specially loved by God — how is that not ridiculous? To sit watching the stars and the moon and keep count of months and days, and to carve up God’s arrangements and the turning of the seasons to suit their own impulses, some for festivals and others for mourning — who would take that for the worship of God, and not far rather for a display of foolishness? So I think you have learned enough about how rightly Christians hold back from the emptiness and deception everyone shares, and from the fussiness and bragging of the Jews. But as for the mystery of their own worship of God, do not expect to be able to learn that from any man. [h]

Christians are not marked off from the rest of mankind by country or language or customs. They do not live in cities of their own anywhere, or use some altered dialect, or practice an odd way of life. This teaching of theirs was not discovered by the thinking and fretting of busy men, and they are not the champions of a human doctrine, as some people are. They live in Greek cities and in foreign ones, wherever each man’s lot has fallen, and they follow the local customs in clothing and food and the rest of ordinary life — while all the time they display the astonishing and admittedly strange character of their own citizenship. [j]

They live in countries of their own, but as resident foreigners. They take part in everything as citizens and put up with everything as strangers. Every foreign land is their own country, and every country of their own a foreign land. They marry like everyone else and have children, but they do not throw away the ones that are born. They set out a common table, but not a common bed. They are in the flesh, but they do not live according to the flesh. They spend their days on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the appointed laws, and in their own lives they surpass the laws.

They love everyone, and are persecuted by everyone. They are unknown, and they are condemned. They are put to death, and they are made alive. They are beggars, and they make many rich. They lack everything, and they have more than enough of everything. They are dishonored, and in their dishonor they are given glory. They are slandered, and shown to be in the right. They are abused, and they bless; they are insulted, and they pay back honor. They do good and are punished as criminals; and when they are punished they are glad, as though they were being brought to life. Jews make war on them as foreigners and Greeks hunt them down, and the people who hate them cannot say what the reason for the hatred is.

To put it simply: what the soul is in the body, that is what Christians are in the world. The soul is spread through all the parts of the body, and Christians through all the cities of the world. The soul lives in the body but is not from the body, and Christians live in the world but are not from the world. The soul is invisible and is kept under guard in a visible body, and Christians are known to be in the world, but their worship of God stays out of sight. [n]

The flesh hates the soul and makes war on it, though it has suffered no wrong, because it is kept from enjoying its pleasures; and the world hates Christians, though it has suffered no wrong from them, because they set themselves against its pleasures. The soul loves the flesh that hates it, and the body’s parts as well; and Christians love the people who hate them. The soul is shut up in the body, and yet it is what holds the body together; and Christians are held in the world as in a guardhouse, and yet they are what hold the world together. The soul is immortal and lives in a mortal tent; and Christians live as foreigners among perishable things, waiting for what does not perish, in the heavens. The soul is made better when it goes short of food and drink; and Christians, punished every day, only grow more numerous. God has stationed them at a post that high, and it is not right for them to walk away from it.

For, as I said, what was handed down to them is no earthly invention. It is no mortal notion they think worth guarding so carefully, and they have not been put in charge of the administration of human mysteries. No: the Almighty himself, the Maker of everything, the invisible God, planted among men, out of the heavens, the truth and the holy Word that no mind can take in, and set it firm in their hearts. [p]

And he did not, as anyone might have guessed, send men some underling, or an angel, or a ruler, or one of those who manage things on earth, or one of those entrusted with running things in the heavens. He sent the craftsman and maker of all things himself: the one by whom he made the heavens, by whom he shut the sea inside its own boundaries, whose secrets all the elements faithfully keep; the one from whom the sun received the measures of its daily course to keep, whom the moon obeys when he orders it to shine at night, whom the stars obey as they follow the moon’s course; the one by whom everything has been arranged and bounded and put under order — the heavens and what is in the heavens, the earth and what is in the earth, the sea and what is in the sea, fire, air, the deep, what is in the heights, what is in the depths, what is in between. This is the one he sent to them.

Was it — as a man might reckon it — for tyranny, and fear, and terror? Not at all. It was in consideration and gentleness. As a king sending a son who is a king, so he sent him; he sent him as God; he sent him as a man to men; he sent him as one who saves, as one who persuades and does not force, for force is no part of God. He sent him as one calling, not chasing us down; he sent him as one loving, not judging. For he will send him as judge — and who will stand up under his coming? …

… thrown to wild animals so that they will deny the Lord, and yet not overcome? Do you not see that the more of them are punished, the more the others increase? These do not look like the works of a man. This is the power of God. These are the proofs that he has come.

For which human being knew at all what God is, before he came? Or do you accept the empty, silly talk of those philosophers everybody finds so trustworthy? Some of them said God is fire — they give the name of God to the thing they are going to end up in — and others water, and others some other one of the elements God created. And yet, if any one of those accounts is acceptable, every single one of the other created things could just as well be pronounced God. But all this is the marvel-mongering and fraud of charlatans. No human being has ever seen him or made him known; he showed himself. And he showed himself through faith, which is the only thing given us for seeing God. [s]

For God, the Master and maker of all things, who made everything and sorted it into its order, turned out to be not only a lover of people but patient with them. He always was that way, and is, and will be: kind and good, slow to anger and true; and he alone is good. And having thought out a great and unspeakable plan, he shared it with his Son alone. So long as he was keeping his wise purpose to himself, hidden as a secret, he seemed to be neglecting us and taking no thought for us. But when, through his beloved Son, he uncovered and made plain what had been prepared from the beginning, he gave us everything at once: a share in his good gifts, and the sight and understanding of them. Which of us would ever have expected that?

So, having already arranged everything with his Son in his own mind, he let us go on, right up to the former time, carried along by disordered impulses just as we wanted, dragged off by pleasures and cravings. Not that he took the slightest pleasure in our sins — he was putting up with them. He was not approving that time of wrongdoing; he was fashioning the present time of righteousness. He meant that we, convicted in that earlier time by our own works as unworthy of life, should now be counted worthy of it by God’s kindness, and that after we had made it plain that on our own we cannot enter the kingdom of God, we should be made able by the power of God. [u]

But when our wrongdoing had been filled full, and it had been shown completely that the wage waiting for it was punishment and death, and the time came that God had appointed for making his own kindness and power plain at last — what overflowing love God has for people! — he did not hate us, or push us away, or hold our wrongs against us. He was patient. He put up with us. In mercy he took our sins on himself. He gave up his own Son as a ransom for us: the holy one for the lawless, the innocent one for the wicked, the righteous one for the unrighteous, the imperishable one for the perishable, the immortal one for the mortal.

For what else could cover our sins but his righteousness? In whom could we — lawless and irreverent as we were — be counted righteous, except in the Son of God alone? What a sweet exchange! What work no one can trace out! What benefits beyond all expectation! — that the lawlessness of many should be hidden in one righteous man, and that the righteousness of one should count many lawless people righteous.

So, having convicted us in the former time of our nature’s inability to reach life, and having now shown us the Savior who is able to save even what cannot be saved, by both of these he wanted us to trust his kindness — to consider him our provider, father, teacher, counselor, healer, mind, light, honor, glory, strength and life — and to stop worrying about clothing and food.