I Shall Dwell Among You

Christians As a Diasporic People

There are many ways of cataloguing Christian identity. Christians have understood themselves, variously, as a collegium, a “guild” or free-will association; as a philosophical schola, teaching a doctrine of ethics, physics, and metaphysics; as a mystery cult, initiating the postulant into a participation in the divine life; and as, indeed, a basileia, Christ’s kingdom on earth. And in different ways, I think each of these descriptions does something useful, something meaningful, something even irreplaceable that justifies its appeal in certain contexts. At the same time, overemphasis on any one of them has a distorting effect, reducing Christian identity to something aberrant from human nature, rather than as a way of being human in the world. And so, of all such descriptions, the most foundational, important, and enduring one is the sense of Christians as an ethnos, a genus, and a populus—that is, Christians as a people.