Friday, September 26, 2025

On the Christians' New Genus as Members of the Divine Race that Transcends Earthly Ethnic Divisions

 

Despite the Apostle Paul seemingly believing that a Gentile needed to receive the ancestral seed of Abraham through David through the Jewish Jesus, even if that were so, the Indo-European need not fixate on this aspect of Pauline theology; because the greater theological emphasis in the New Testament is that of joining the race or genus of the Heavenly Beings (Jehovah and his Elohim). For in the Realm of the Heavenly Beings there truly would be no male nor female human bodies, nor Jew or Greek or Germanic ethnicities. 

As the Apostle Paul says in Galatians 3.28 (followed by commentary by BibleHub below): 

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Context:

…27 For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise.…

Cross References:

Colossians 3:11:

Here there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, or free, but Christ is all and is in all.

1 Corinthians 12:13:

For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free, and we were all given one Spirit to drink.


Romans 10:12:

For there is no difference between Jew and Greek: The same Lord is Lord of all, and gives richly to all who call on Him,


Ephesians 2:14-16:

For He Himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has torn down the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing in His flesh the law of commandments and decrees. He did this to create in Himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace and reconciling both of them to God in one body through the cross, by which He put to death their hostility.

Acts 10:34-35:

Then Peter began to speak: “I now truly understand that God does not show favoritism, but welcomes those from every nation who fear Him and do what is right.


Romans 3:22-23:

And this righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no distinction, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,

John 17:21:

that all of them may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I am in You. May they also be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me.

1 Peter 2:9-10:

But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, to proclaim the virtues of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.  Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.

James 2:5:

Listen, my beloved brothers: Has not God chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom He promised those who love Him?

Matthew 23:8:

But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers.

Philemon 1:16:

no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a beloved brother. He is especially beloved to me, but even more so to you, both in person and in the Lord.

1 John 3:1-2:

Behold what manner of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God. And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know Him.  Beloved, we are now children of God, and what we will be has not yet been revealed. We know that when Christ appears, we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is.

Isaiah 49:6:

He says: “It is not enough for You to be My Servant, to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the protected ones of Israel. I will also make You a light for the nations, to bring My salvation to the ends of the earth.”

Joel 2:28-29:

And afterward, I will pour out My Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on My menservants and maidservants, I will pour out My Spirit in those days.


I interpret these verses as basically pointing to the larger theological agenda of Paul and the New Testament authors seeking to elevate and divinize all humans through the supernatural genus of Christ as a divine being; with the end goal being not a focus on one particular race or ethnicity, but instead the growth of one new race or genus called the holy ones: who become the genus or race of the Divine Beings, the genus of God and the lesser gods (to use the language of Michael Heiser).  

This is explained in greater detail in the book The Light of Tabor: Toward a Monistic Christology, wherein author David Bentley Hart writes in chapter one, Nature and Genus (at Location 118, 297-315, 321-382), the following:


[For in him we live and move and are, as indeed some of the poets among you have said: “For we too are his race.” So, being God’s race, we ought not to suppose the divine to be like gold or silver or stone, a graven product of human craft and conception.] —Acts 17:28–29 

 

... I want only to try to understand as best I can what it must actually mean to say that Jesus of Nazareth was in every sense a true human being and also wholly identical to the eternal Son of God, the Logos in and through whom all things subsist. ...

 

... As a rule, in those extremely infrequent instances in which the word φύσις appears in the New Testament, it tends to be used with what was originally its most ordinary meaning: origin, derivation, line of descent, family, pedigree, race. Whether its appearance in what is probably the latest of the books in the canon, in 2 Peter (1:4), constitutes an exception— assuming that the phrase θείας κοινωνοὶ φύσεως does not simply mean something like “members of the divine family”—is a conversation for another time. But, as a rule, the word certainly does not bear the weight in scripture of anything so imposing as a large metaphysical category. When Paul speaks in Romans of that which is παρὰ φύσιν, “outside nature,” he is doing so in much the way in which Aristotle used such language in the Politics, as referring to something outside its proper place in the cosmic or social order8—in Paul’s case, meaning either outside natural processes of procreation (1:26) or outside a natural line of descent or heredity (11:24).9 In that acceptation, φύσις differs little in its connotation from γένος. This brings me to those verses from Acts from which I set out, which recount the story of Paul favorably quoting someone, probably either Cleanthes or Aratus, to the effect that we are all, simply insofar as we are human, “God’s race”—or “offspring” or “family” or “genus” or what have you—and then immediately radicalizing the claim by speaking of us as, quite literally, God’s “congeners”: γένος οὖν ὑπάρχοντες τοῦ θεοῦ (nota bene the definite article in that phrase). Or, as Ephesians says, it is from the Father that “every kindred within the heavens and upon the earth receives its name”: . . . τὸν πατέρα, ἐξ οὗ πᾶσα πατριὰ ἐν οὐρανοῖς καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς ὀνομάζεται (3:14–15): which is to say, all spiritual beings, whether below or above the moon, whether on the earth or among the planetary spheres and fixed stars, share in a single divine and natural genealogy—a single genus or kind. ... 

 

... For Paul, however, and really for the whole of the New Testament, our essence does not necessarily differ in any significant way from that of astral intelligences or angels or heavenly spirits of whatever kind; rather, our bodies—bodies of flesh and blood, bodies of sin (Romans 6:6), bodies of death (Romans 7:24–25)—are what separate us from that which is above, and it is our bodies that must be redeemed in order for us to be saved (Romans 3:23). ... Paul is quite clear on the matter in 1 Corinthians 15: “flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom of God; neither does perishability inherit imperishability,” σὰρξ καὶ αἷμα βασιλείαν θεοῦ κληρονομῆσαι οὐ δύναται οὐδὲ ἡ φθορὰ τὴν ἀφθαρσίαν κληρονομεῖ; and it is precisely by his having set aside the composite, inherently perishable, “animated” carnal body—the σῶμα ψυχικόν—and assumed instead a spiritual body—a σῶμα πνευματικόν—like that of angels that Christ has been transformed into “life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45), conquered the celestial powers, and taken his seat beside the Father above (Romans 8:34); and thus too, as spirit, he can also join us to himself, return again to raise us up out of the realm of death, and make a way for us through the heavens to the Father (Romans 8:39; Philippians 3:20–21).[10] ... 

 

... What seems more or less absolutely clear to me is that, for Paul, ψυχή was chiefly the life principle proper to the realm of generation and decay, which cannot depart the aerial and terrestrial sphere, while πνεῦμα is a kind of life bound neither to death nor to the sublunary realm, and so able to move at liberty among all the cosmic realms, below and above. So too, in Christ, we are destined to be set free from our σώματα ἐπίγεια, “earthbound bodies,” and receive σώματα ἐπουράνια, “bodies stationed upon the heavens,” in their stead; for, whereas the former are limited by φθορά (decay), ἀτιμία (dishonor), and ἀσθένεια (weakness), the latter enjoy true ἀφθαρσία (incorruptibility), δόξα (glory), and δυνάμις (power) (1 Corinthians 15:42–43). So: ὁ πρῶτος ἄνθρωπος ἐκ γῆς χοϊκός, ὁ δεύτερος ἄνθρωπος ἐξ οὐρανοῦ. οἷος ὁ χοϊκός, τοιοῦτοι καὶ οἱ χοϊκοί, καὶ οἷος ὁ ἐπουράνιος, τοιοῦτοι καὶ οἱ ἐπουράνιοι• καὶ καθὼς ἐφορέσαμεν τὴν εἰκόνα τοῦ χοϊκοῦ, φορέσομεν καὶ τὴν εἰκόνα τοῦ ἐπουρανίου, “The first man out of the earth, earthly; the second man out of heaven. As the earthly man, so also those who are earthly; and, as the heavenly, so also those who are heavenly; and, just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly man” (1 Corinthians 15:47–49). This is for Paul nothing less than the transformation of the psychical composite into the spiritual “simple”—the metamorphosis of the mortal fleshly body that belongs to soul into the immortal fleshless body that belongs to spirit: ἡμεῖς ἀλλαγησόμεθα. Δεῖ γὰρ τὸ φθαρτὸν τοῦτο ἐνδύσασθαι ἀφθαρσίαν καὶ τὸ θνητὸν τοῦτο ἐνδύσασθαι ἀθανασίαν, “We shall be changed. For this perishable thing must clothe itself in imperishability, and this mortal thing must clothe itself in immortality” (1 Corinthians 15:52–54).[11] 

In this sense, much of the hope of the earliest Christians appears to fall wholly in line with many of the highest spiritual longings of Graeco-Roman late antiquity, Jewish and Pagan alike: divinization through the assumption of a glorious and immortal form, ascent through the aetherial heavens, assimilation to the state of angels or daemons or gods or stars, entry into the highest sanctuary in or above the heavens. ... The body of flesh, Paul tells us, is but a terrestrial tent, in which we groan with fervent longing to be clothed instead in our celestial dwelling, so that we should not be found exposed and naked and so that what is mortal within us might be swallowed up in life (2 Corinthians 5:1– 9). To be raised is to have the body of abjection conformed to the body of Christ’s glory (Philippians 3:21). ...

 

In other words, the New Testament is basically saying that one's gender or ethnicity ultimately doesn't matter after death, when those who are baptized into Christ and receive his divine nature (pneuma) join the genus/race of God and the lesser gods (again to use Michael Heiser's language).  


As the Bible Hub cross referenced scriptures (quoted above) make clear, the God of the Bible is ultimately the God of all humanity, by only beginning with a "chosen people" (Israel), but ultimately seeking to bring into the "light" all nations/ethnicities. And remember, before Abraham was "chosen" to be the seed of a new people, before that all of humanity was One Race breathed in by God and equally imagers of God (to use another phrase from Michael Heiser) Abraham was simply selected to be the means of the Divine Path in the first phase and strategy of the biblical God; and so what the New Testament is saying basically is that Israel has been replaced with Gentiles as a new holy people, as the focal point of the Divine Path through the in-spiration of the divine Logos.

 

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On the Christians' New Genus as Members of the Divine Race that Transcends Earthly Ethnic Divisions

  Despite the Apostle Paul seemingly believing that a Gentile needed to receive the ancestral seed of Abraham through David through the Jewi...