St. Peter Canisius Apostolate

From the Letter of Barnabas (around 120-130 A.D.):

Since, then, He has renewed us by the forgiveness of sins, He has put a different stamp upon us, so that our souls might be like the souls of children, as they would be if He were creating us anew.

One of the forgotten elements of Christianity is that through Christ we are created anew. Scripture uses different words to attest to this: “clean heart” (Ps 51.10); “new spirit” (Ps 51.10; Ez 36.26); “heart of flesh” (Ez 36.26); “being born again” (Jn 3.3-5); “dead to sin” (Rom 6.1-11); “new creation” (2 Cor 5.17); “regeneration” and “renewal” (Titus 3.5); “children of God” (1 Jn 3.1-2). And the list could continue.

Unlike the Protestant Reformers, who more or less held that justification means that God simply declares us righteous, the perennial teaching of the Church — which is the perennial teaching of Scripture — has always been that in justifying us God transforms us, that God really changes us, us into new creations.

This is the great truth that the above passage from the Letter of Barnabas teaches: through the forgiveness of sins God puts a “different stamp upon us,” making our souls like “souls of children.”

What does this change mean for us? Later Catholic theology would speak of being transformed by the “supernatural life of God.” The notion of supernatural life isn’t that difficult to understand.

We observe three basic kinds of life on earth. There is plant life, there is animal life, and there is human life. Each of these different lives has a distinct nature attached to it. Plants take their food from the ground, for example, and animals cannot cook their food. If we were to observe a tree walking around looking for food, or of if we saw a fox pull out a skillet and begin cooking its newly killed beaver, we would say the tree and the fox were acting to natures above their own. The tree would be acting according to animal nature, and the fox would be acting according to human nature. Now, the Latin word for “above” is super, so another way of saying that the tree and fox were active above their own natures would be to say that they were acting supernaturally.¹

When a person is forgiven, when he is justified, when he is given a new spirit and a new heart, when he is regenerated, made a new creation, when he is born again into the supernatural life of God — all of these concepts express the same fundamental truth — when does that mean?

On the most basic level, we are able to believe what God has revealed through Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition as proclaimed and preserved by the Catholic Church. We are also able to trust deeply in God’s promises — that by living according to faith we shall gain the reward of heaven. And we are also able to love God above all things, including ourselves, thereby making God the object of all our words, thoughts, and actions.

On a higher level, we now have the ability to receive the other sacraments, particularly the Eucharist. We are able to pray to God not merely as one of his creatures, but as one of his children. We can unite our own hardships and sufferings to the passion and death of Jesus Christ. Most importantly, perhaps, is that we are able to bring God’s grace to others through acts of kindness, charity, and prayer. Thus, through the sacrament of baptism we become like a sacrament ourselves — a visible reality that carries the hidden God into the world.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS