Helping humans, not ‘humanity’

November 18th 

For we also once were foolish ourselves, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, hateful, hating one another. But when the kindness of God our Savior and His love for mankind appeared, He saved us, not on the basis of deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out upon us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior, so that being justified by His grace we would be made heirs according to the hope of eternal life.

Titus 3:3-7 (NASB)

The New Testament way of looking at humanity is not the modern way. In the New Testament men and women exist, there is no such thing as “Humanity,” the human race as a whole.

A materialist says—Because my religious beliefs do for me, therefore they are satisfactory. Not in the tiniest degree. The test of a man’s religious faith is not that it does for him, but that it will do for the worst wreck he ever knew. If every one were well brought up and had a fine heredity, then there are any number of intellectual forms of belief that would do. The materialistic line works like a searchlight, lighting up what it does and no more, but the daylight of actual experience reveals a hundred and one other facts. It does not show a clear simple path, but brings to light a multitude of facts never seen before. The evolutionist looks at man and says, What a glorious promise of what he is going to be! The New Testament looks at man’s body and moral life and intelligence and says, What a ruin of what God designed him to be!

from Oswald Chambers’ Shadow of an Agony
(Humanity and Holiness)

Yesterday, today and forever

August 12th

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today, yes and forever.

Hebrews 13:8 (NASB)

An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century. If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe in any miracle in any age. If a man believes in a will behind law, he can believe in any miracle in any age. Therefore in dealing with any historical answer, the point is not whether it was given in our time, but whether it was given in answer to our question.

It is commonly the loose and latitudinarian Christians who pay quite indefensible compliments to Christianity. They talk as if there had never been any piety or pity until Christianity came, a point on which any mediaeval would have been eager to correct them. They represent that the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it was the first to preach simplicity or self-restraint, or inwardness and sincerity. They will think me very narrow (whatever that means) if I say that the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it was the first to preach Christianity. Its peculiarity was that it was peculiar, and simplicity and sincerity are not peculiar, but obvious ideals for all mankind. Christianity was the answer to a riddle, not the last truism uttered after a long talk.

from G. K. Chesteron’s Orthodoxy (Ch. 5)