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Introduction
Abraham in the Koran
The
Galatian Test
Conclusion
Footnotes
Home
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Abraham in Salvation
History
The meaning
of ‘Abrahamic’ now has to be addressed from the Christian perspective. A
place to start is with the first line of the first gospel ‘A record of the genealogy of Jesus
Christ the son of David the son of Abraham’ (Matt.1.1). Matthew did
not make that statement his first statement just to get started. Just as he
didn’t make verses 18-20 of chapter 28 his final statement just to end with
some sort of triumphant flourish. Matthew starts his gospel, his statement
of the faith of the Christian Church, at the point Salvation History had
reached when Jesus was born. He concludes it at the radically different
point it had reached with the life, mission, death and resurrection of
Jesus. Jesus was born within the Abrahamic period and covenant of Salvation
History. His life, mission, suffering, death and resurrection brought that
period and covenant to an end. ‘In Christ the old covenant is abrogated’
(2.Cor.3.15); and with the shedding of his blood he brought in the New:
‘This cup is the new covenant sealed by my blood’ (1 Cor.11.25).
The old
covenant referred to, as we will see, was the one God gave to Abraham. It
was not however God’s first covenant. God’s first covenant was with Noah.
Matthew does not start with God’s first divine action in Salvation History.
Rather, he starts with Abraham. Abraham was the person God chose to make a
covenant with after Noah. The covenant with Noah was on behalf of all
mankind. In contrast, but in order to make the Noah covenant effective,
with Abraham God narrowed his Saving Design to the practical and the
concrete. In Abraham God chose one nation, Israel, to be the agent of
Salvation History on behalf of all mankind. Then, at the time of his
choosing, in His Son, God abrogated the covenant with Abraham and replaced
it with the New. This New Covenant was the restoration and the fulfilment
of the universal covenant God made with Noah; and its transformation.
That
Abraham had a crucial role in Salvation History is the Christian faith. In
Matthew 1.1 Abraham, together with David, is declared part of God’s plan of
salvation for mankind in that they begot Jesus. They were his ancestors
‘according to the flesh’ (kata sarka. Rom.9.5). God the Son became human.
God the Son had human ancestors. The Second Person of the Divine Trinity in
order to be human had to be genuinely human. No human being is human in the
abstract. Each one of us belongs to specific parents, in a particular
place, at a specific time, in a particular culture. God the Son was Jewish.
Descent from David could not be more Jewish. God the Son dwelt for nine
months in one Jewish woman’s womb and suckled at that one woman’s breasts.
The Lord was with her indeed; and full of grace she was indeed (Lk.1.28).
To have been conceived without sin, to have been sinless and to have been
assumed body and soul into heaven are really only a part of the gift God
made to her. The major gift was Himself. The rest followed. The Lord was
‘with her’ in a way we cannot imagine, a relationship of the dearest and
deepest mystical intimacy quite beyond any words or experience of ours.
That mystical intimacy was the gift of gifts. So wonderfully did the Lord deal with his
mother, such great things did he do for her, and holy is his name (Lk.
1.49)..
And what a gift too to the nation that God chose to be born into!
What greater glory could a people have? Yet, as Peter instructs us: ‘God
has no favourites’ (Acts 10.34). The glory that was Israel’s was, as the
Apostolic Church so earnestly wanted their fellow Jews to understand, both
the fulfilment of its covenant and then its abrogation to be succeeded by
the restoration and fulfilment in Christ of God’s first covenant. ‘He had
helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his
descendants for ever, as he said to our fathers’ (Lk.1.54f). ‘Noah’ was narrowed down to ‘Abraham’ and
in the fullness of time, when in Christ its purpose was achieved, ‘Abraham’
was abrogated and replaced with a new and universal covenant with all
mankind, as God had promised to Noah (Gen. 9.8f): ‘Go forth and make all
nations my disciples, baptising them in the name of the Father and the Son
and the Holy Spirit’ (Matt. 28.19)
Thus,
Matthew starts his gospel by paying the most glorious tribute to the nation
he belonged to and loved passionately. It is significant that it is only in
Matthew that there is the record of Jesus weeping over Jerusalem. His
gospel is all of a piece. He begins
it by proclaiming that Jesus Christ was a Jew, belonging to specific
ancestors and to a specific nation. He concludes his gospel by proclaiming
that that man, that Jew, was divine and that his saving mission is for all
mankind. ‘Full authority in heaven and on earth has been committed to me.
Go forth therefore and make all nations my disciples; baptise men
everywhere in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and
teach them to observe all that I have commanded you. And be assured, I am
with you always, to the end of time’ (28.19f). That is the fulfilment of
the promise, the new covenant, the ‘good news’, ‘God’s hidden wisdom, his
secret purpose framed from the very beginning to bring us to glory’
(1.Cor.2.7).
In Jesus
God’s design is revealed and achieved for all. He is the fulfilment of the
promise made by God to his ancestors, first to Noah (Gen. 9.8-11), then to Abraham
(Gen.12), Jesus’ ancestor according to the flesh and our father in faith,
then to the people of Israel, and finally, ‘in the fullness of time’
(Gal.4.4), when ‘the fulfilment of the ages has come’ (1.Cor. 1011), to all
Noah’s descendants ‘all that lives on earth’ (Gen.9.17), ‘nation by nation’ (10.32).
All utterly
unforeseeable. ‘Who knows the mind of God? Who has been his counsellor?’
(Rom. 11.34). All has been made new. Jesus is ‘new wine in the cluster of
grapes’ (Isaiah 65.8), in him the Lord God ‘creates a new heaven and a new
earth’ (v.37). But the Lord God did not do that without the pain of the
birth and the suffering and death of his Son, who is God, just as no woman
bears a child without pain or gives birth to a son before the onset of labour
(66.7). God became what he had made, God the Lord of hosts wed what he had
made (54.5). The fulfilment of the promise made to Abraham the man of
faith, the father of the Chosen People, our father in faith, was the
ineffable unforeseeable Incarnation of the Son of God who ‘did not abhor
the Virgin’s womb’. So ineffable, so
unforeseeable, so incomprehensible, so much a stumbling block, so much a
folly, that the Jews, and six centuries later Mohammad (Koran 4.171 nd
112.1)), rejected it. The Christian faith is the gift of God (Acts 11.17).
It is not earned. No one merits it. ‘There is no place for pride in God’s
presence. You are in Christ Jesus by God’s act ‘(1.Cor.1.29f).
‘God has no
favourites’ (Acts 10.34). It is the Christian faith that his blood was shed
for all, not just for some or just ‘for the many’. But for all. Salvation
history is the record of how that moment was arrived at and achieved. In
the Bible, which is the book of the People of God, Salvation history begins
with Noah from whom through his son Shem Abraham was descended.
The
First Covenant.
‘Through
one man sin entered the world, and through sin death, and thus sin pervaded
the whole human race in as much as all men had sinned’’ (Rom.5.12’. And
‘when the Lord saw that man had done much evil on earth and his thoughts
and inclinations were always evil, he was sorry he had ever made man on
earth’ (Gen.6.5f). However, ‘God’s act of grace was out of all proportion
to Adam’s wrong-doing’ (Rom. 5.15). ‘God said to Noah: Come out of the ark,
you and your wife, your sons and their wives. Bring out every living
creatures that is with you, live things of every kind, bird and beast and
every reptile that moves on the earth, and let them swarm over the earth
and be fruitful and increase’ (Gen.8.16f). And then the Lord made his first
covenant, ‘between myself and every living creature after you to endless
generations (9.12), ‘between myself and you and living things of every
kind……an everlasting covenant between God
and living things on earth of every kind (v.15f). Faced with sin God
is merciful.
‘The mercy of heaven is not
strained.
It droppeth as the gentle
rain
from heaven upon the earth
beneath……………
. In the course of justice none of
us should see salvation.
We do pray for mercy’ (Merchant
of Venice. IV.1) (fn.4)
The
narrator of the Noah story, writing round about 500 BC, is patently a
monotheist. It is implicit in how and what he writes. The God who speaks
with Noah is the God of every living thing, able to ‘wipe man and beast,
reptiles and birds off the face of the earth’ (Gen.6.7), the God who
‘grieves at the loathsomeness of all mankind’ (v.13), the God who is able
to see into man’s ‘thoughts and inclinations’ (v.6), the God who controls
nature (7.4), able to destroy ‘everything that had the breath of life in
its nostrils…every living thing that existed on earth, man and beast,
reptile and bird’ (v22f), sparing only ‘Noah and his company in the ark’
(23).
In effect
Noah is a new Adam, every one else has been wiped out. God’s covenant with
Noah is therefore with all mankind –and every living creature upon the
earth. That is the express message of the Noah story, that everyone else
has been wiped out and with them all their gross sexuality (6.1-4) and
their universal violence and corruption (v12f). The world of the Fall in
other words has been wiped clean away. God had been so totally appalled by
the sinfulness of humanity that he began to regret he ever made us.(v6f);
but ‘Noah –a righteous man, the one blameless man of his time, who walked
with God- had won the Lord’s favour’.(v8f)
All six
accounts of the covenant God now makes with Noah are emphatic that it is on
behalf of all mankind. ‘My bow I set in the cloud, sign of the covenant….This
is the sign of the covenant which I have made between myself and all that
lives on earth’. (9.13ff). That covenant is a very simple one; and totally
one-sided; asking nothing from mankind in return. It is God’s promise that
never again will he ‘curse the earth because of man, however evil his
inclinations may be…never again kill every living creature’ (9.13ff &
8.21). God treats wickedness divinely. He subverts it. It becomes the
reason, not for punishment or for anger, but for mercy. ‘In the course of
justice none of us should see salvation. We do pray for mercy’.
The story
of Noah then is the emphatic declaration by its Jewish author that God, as
in that all-important vision of the Apostle Peter, ‘has no favourites’. His
covenant is with all mankind. In the story Noah is not Jewish. Noah is
represented, with full deliberation, as Everyman. In the story Noah and his
wife and sons and his sons’ wives are the only human beings left standing.
The universality of God’s saving design is laid down for every reader to
see. ‘The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and
Japheth...These three were the sons of Noah, and their descendants spread
over the whole earth (9.18f); from them came the separate nations on earth
after the flood’ (10.32)
Salvation History begins then with Noah, with God’s covenant with
Noah. It is with Noah that God moves from the universal to the particular
–to one specific people; and finally, in the fullness of time, back to the
universal –to all mankind (fn 6). It
is the mind of God to save all his creatures and not just one group of
them. All human beings are made equally in his image and likeness. It is
the tragedy of the Jewish people as a nation that they have not understood
that they were chosen by God to be the instrument of his saving grace to
all mankind. They still believe that God focuses his love either just on
them or at least more on them, than on anyone else. They have not
understood that, in the words of their fellow Jews, Peter and Paul: ‘God
has no favourites’. They have misunderstood the nature of their choice, not
yet discerned the divine intent of their divine choosing. They have not yet
learnt to share. They have not understood that God’s choice of them as the
instrument of universal salvation, as the womb of his Incarnate Son, makes
them incredibly special –but it was as the instrument. The prophet Isaiah
said it all to them, told them what they were for: ‘I will make you a light
to the nations, to be my salvation to the furthest bounds of the earth’
(49.6). Though they had eyes, they did not see, though they had ears they
did not hear.
And that is the message of the author of Matthew’s gospel, a
fellow Jew, who begins with a declaration of that incredible and exalted
choice and ends with the statement of its divine purpose, that through them
God’s grace is for all men and women equally. It is profoundly significant
in the story –written by a Jew- that God’s first covenant of forgiveness
and grace is not with a Jew but with Noah as the representative of all
mankind. It is with Shem one of the sons of Noah and with Shem’s descendant
Abraham, an Arab, not a Jew, that God begins to put flesh on his design and
his promise of universal salvation. The Jewish people have misread the role
of their father Abraham.
God’s
Covenant with Abraham
All the
steps God took in Salvation History led to Jesus Christ; and all those
steps were taken for all mankind. ‘Through him God chose to reconcile the whole
universe to himself, making peace through the shedding of his blood upon
the cross, to reconcile all things, whether on earth or in heaven, through
him alone’ (Col.1.20). Step by step, through Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac
and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, Joseph, Moses, Joshua, the Kings, the
Judges, David, the Prophets, Judith and Ruth, the whole people of Israel
who were his People, making use of their strengths and their weaknesses,
their virtues and their sinfulness. In this way person by person, event by
event, God prepared mankind for his Incarnate Son, born of a Jewish girl of
the House of David.
Abraham, as
has been said, probably wasn’t a monotheist. He wasn’t the end-point in
God’s saving plan. Nor was he the starting point, as we have seen, neither
physically as the progenitor of Jesus nor spiritually as a man who found
favour with God. Genesis ascribes both roles to Noah. ‘Noah had won God’s
favour’ (Gen.6.8) and was spared destruction. And Noah was the father of
Shem, who begot Arphaxad, who begot Shelah, who begot Eher, who begot
Peleg, who begot Reu, who begot Serug, who begot Nahor, who begot Terah,
who begot Abram (11.10-26). At the same time the role of Abraham in
salvation history is critical. He trusted in the promise of the Lord and
left his country, his kinsmen and his father’s house and went into the land
the Lord showed him (12.1f) to become ‘the father of a host of nations’
(17.5), and from him came the Christ.
It helps considerably to understand the Christian meaning of
Abraham if we read Stephen’s ‘apologia’ in Acts 7 (fn.7). Stephen informs his accusers that the
significance of Abraham is that he represented the universality of
salvation. It was precisely the statement they did not want to hear. His
statement to the Jews was that the God of their fathers was not the God of
the Jews only but also of the Gentiles and that His worship was no longer
to be restricted to any particular locality or people. He took his
listeners through the whole history of the Jewish people starting with
Abraham. And the very first point he makes is that it was not in the land
of Israel, to which they attached such sanctity, but in Mesopotamia that
God first appeared to Abraham; that God was with him in Haran; and that
when God brought Abraham, ‘our ancestor’, into Canaan, he gave no permanent
possession therein either to him or to his descendants for many
generations. ‘He gave him nothing, not one yard of land’ (v.5). Yet though
the people of Israel were for a long time strangers in Egypt, God was there
with them. God was with them in Egypt as much as ever he was in the land of
Israel. He blest the Jewish people and he cared for them in their slavery
and he sent Moses as their deliverer.
But who was Moses? Stephen asks. A man ‘trained in all the wisdom
of the Egyptians’. He chose his words with such deliberation. The
Egyptians, the oppressors of the Jewish people, the archetype enemy almost,
had ‘wisdom’. Sophia in the Greek. The same Greek word as used for the Book
of Wisdom in the Septuagint version of the Old Testament. We know from Acts
6.9 that Stephen spoke Greek. In that ‘wisdom’ of the Egyptians, which could well translate as ‘culture’,
Moses, himself the great liberator and law-giver of the Jewish people, was
educated and trained. Wisdom, Stephen is saying, is not restricted to the
Jewish people but pervades the whole universe and all its peoples. God
furthermore, says Stephen, showed himself to Moses in the wilderness of
Sinai, not in the land of Israel; and that very spot, outside of Israel, was
‘holy ground’. The Tabernacle, the sign of God’s presence among his chosen
people, moved from place to place in that wilderness for forty years and
did not find a fixed abode till the time of David. The Temple may indeed
have been constructed by Solomon but ‘the Most High does not live in houses
made by men’.(v.48). Heaven is God’s throne and the earth, and not just one
small part of his, is his footstool. God in Christ is reaching out beyond
Israel to all the earth just as it was outside of the land of Israel that
He began His saving work. There and then he was stoned to death and ‘the
witnesses laid their garments at the feet of a young man called Saul’.
Stephen, in the intent of the author of the Acts, was placing something
else besides at the feet of that young man, and Saul who became Paul took
up the mantel. ‘God has no favourites…..So my gospel declares (Rom.2
11-16). (fn 8)
Matthew’s
gospel provides us with one main element of the Christian understanding of
Abraham’s significance, namely that as founder of the Jewish people his
purpose and theirs was to bring about the ‘birth of Jesus called Messiah’
(1.16), HHthe end point and
goal of the genealogies of Genesis Chapter 11. Stephen provides us with another, that
Abraham represented the universality of God’s saving design. Matthew 1.1-17
was written to proclaim that God saved mankind by what he had created.
Christ was the physical descendant of Abraham. God intervened in history,
he did things in history, he created history. Salvation is physical, it is
rooted in the physical, it happened historically, and it continues
historically in the physical presence of the Son of God in the Eucharist.
God uses what he created to save his creatures: bread and wine, semen and
ova, the wood of the cross, the spittle from his mouth, the oil of the
olive, the water of baptism, the womb of the Virgin, the milk from her
breasts, the Holy Land on which stood the Patriarchs and the Prophets and
God the Son the Messiah himself, the pen and paper of the writers of the gospels
and the letters.
The
significance of Abraham is faith and physicality. The Christian
understanding of the role of Abraham is twofold. He heard the voice of God
and made one almighty act of trust and faith. ‘The Lord said to Abram:
‘Leave your own country, your kinsmen and your father’s house, and go to
the country that I will show you’. Not a theologian was Abram, not a
monotheist. But a man with immense trust in the god he believed in. A
strange strange moment in salvation history. The one God allowed his
creature to identify him with his tribal god. An incarnational moment indeed. The God
who did not abhor the Virgin’s womb did not abhor human error but turned it
into one step towards our redemption. ‘I will make you into a great nation.
All the families on earth will pray to be blessed as you are blessed. And
so Abram set out as the Lord had bidden him. He took his wife Sarai with
him and his nephew Lot. They started on their journey to Canaan. At that
time the Canaanites lived in this land. There the Lord appeared to Abram
and said: ‘I give this land to your descendants’ (Gen.12.1-9).
Who
knows the mind of God? Who has been his counsellor? God made use of mankind
as it was, in all its ugly politics and aggression and cruelty. He allowed
the writers of these vitally important passages centuries after the
abrahamic period, their political import as significant in our day as when
they were written, to justify land grab and ethnic cleaning. What else was
available to God but mankind as it was? God had to start the redemption of
mankind with the reality of a sinful mankind. The story of Abraham and his
descendants is not just a story of great religious faith and endurance but
also of plain straight human aggression and deceit. To save his skin on
entering in Egypt Abraham orders the beautiful Sarai to tell people she is
his sister and he hands her over to the Pharoah, into the Pharoah’s harem;
he did it again with Abimelech king of Gerar, this time, it seems, using
her as a bargaining chip to get land in Gerar to settle in. He engaged in
war. He was a very local warlord. He wouldn’t get to first base in today’s
canonisation process. God chose Abraham for what he was and how he was.
Abraham responded with faith, trust and obedience. Salvation history began,
and continues to this day, with man and woman as they are ‘however evil
their inclinations may be’ (Gen.8.21).
‘In
the fullness of time God sent his son, born of a woman…to purchase
freedom.’ Gal.4.4. Redemption is grounded in the physical and the historical.
If it hadn’t been directly relevant to what was the fullness of time and
what was the nature of God’s sending of his son’ Paul would not have added
‘born of a woman’. (genomenon ek gunaikos). It was intrinsic to the
message. He wasn’t doing it for the alliteration like in an old English
poem. ‘Born of women’ in Galatians is ‘according to the flesh’ in Romans.
The Son of God was born of a woman, he was flesh, he was blood, he had
human ancestors. God had human ancestors. Little wonder Mohammad, appalled
by the beliefs and rituals of the Kabba with -among other things- its three
daughters of the god allah, his whole life now dedicated to obliterating
polytheism and establishing monotheism, gave Christianity very short
shrift.
As
Christians we have to be completely clear about this. God did not, as in
Islamic belief, just intervene in human history with a message. In Islam
God’s intervention takes the form of a text believed to have been written
from all eternity, communicated through Mohammad. No. God’s revelation of
himself as Pope John Paul II wrote is infinitely richer than that. The
Christian faith is that God intervened in human history by choosing,
guiding, speaking with, and defending a the Jewish people, and then in the
fullness of time becoming one of them..
‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God…and the Word
became flesh and dwelt among us’ Jn.1. He was born of a woman -genomenon ek
gunaikos. Nothing could be more different from Islam than that.
‘Abrahamic’
in God’s plan and in Christian doctrine therefore means something that
Mohammad expressly denied and rejected when he said: ‘People of the Book,
do not transgress the bounds of your religion. Speak nothing but the truth
about God. The Messiah, Jesus the Son of Mary, was no more than God’s
apostle, and His word which He cast to Mary, a spirit from Him. So believe
in God and His apostles and do not say ‘Three’. God is but one God. God
forbid that he should have a son’ (Koran. 4.171)
That
is only one passage out of a number in the Koran where Mohammad denies both
the divinity of Christ and that God is Three Persons. He did so with
religious sincerity. He was not a student of Christian theology. He was a
merchant who converted to monotheism. Besides, Christian bishops, monks and
theologians had themselves been at loggerheads over these matters all over
the East and West for the preceding three centuries. Indeed in Mohammad’s
own lifetime, with the Eastern emperors also taking a full part, the
Christian world was engaged in the very difficult monophysite controversy.
Mohammad had no reason to involve himself in such matters, though 4.171 and
other statements indicate he had some acquaintance with Christian teaching.
He wasn’t a theologian. Intellectually he was a very simple man. That comes
across in every page of the Koran. It is a very simple text. At some point
in his life he had transferred from polytheism, possibly even animism, to
monotheism, a huge spiritual step to take, one which has contributed beyond
measure to the spiritual life of millions upon millions of our fellow human
beings over the last 1400 years, and will continue to do so into the
future.
There
is much to regret, indeed openly and firmly to oppose, in Mohammad’s
beliefs which form the Koran, such as his very repressive perspective on
women, his identification of the spiritual with the secular/political and
his endorsement of violence as an instrument of religion. He was a man of a
specific time and place, of one 7th century Arab tribal culture.
He was unable to distinguish the temporal and the local from the divine,
and that confusion informs the Koran throughout. Islam’s understanding of
revelation has not just made the separation impossible but has repudiated
it. It is an understanding of revelation essentially different from that of
Catholic Christianity. At the same time I deeply admire what rings out like
thunder, bursts out like fire, from the pages of the Koran, Mohammad’s
belief that there is one God and his commitment to and emphasis on prayer.
Abrahamic
in Christianity has an incarnational meaning first and foremost. Jesus the
physical descendant of Abraham was the one whom the Voice from Heaven
declared My Beloved Son (Mk 1.11), was Christ the Lord (Lk 2.11), the fruit of Mary’s womb (Lk
1.42), the Word of God who was in the beginning and who was with God and
was God ) Jn 1.1) and who was made flesh and dwelt among us (Jn.1.14). God
wed what he had made. The Jewish people brought the world to that event.
‘To them belong the patriarchs, and from the patriarchs by the flesh (kata
sarka) the Christ’ (Rom.9.5); and
some of them embraced it like Mary and the Apostles, but most did not,
which is our infinite sadness but is all in God’s hands, with whom all
things work together unto good.(Rom. 8.28), because their refusal to accept
the Christ brought about the enrichment of the world, the enrichment of the
Gentiles (Rom.11.12), an enrichment which will be made even more glorious
when the whole of Israel is saved. ‘Has God rejected his people?’ (11.1).
Absolutely not. ‘No. God has not rejected the people which He acknowledged
of old as his own’ (11.2). In God’s own time ‘all Israel shall be saved’
(11.26). ‘O the depth of the riches, the wisdom and the knowledge of God,
to him be glory for ever’. (11.33ff).
God the Son, the Saviour of
mankind, was of the physical seed of Abraham. God the Creator holds true to
the nature of his creative act. God the Son did not abhor the Virgin’s
womb. God became physical. Seed and egg. God made what He became. ‘God
built what he wed’. Little wonder there were Christological heresies. It is
all too much to take in. It sends a shuddering physical feeling of dread
and awe throughout mind and body.
It is the Christian Faith
that Salvation History was progressively delivered through the Jewish
people and their history beginning with Abraham and was 'in the fullness of
time' completed and consummated by Jesus Christ, the once-and-for-all
Revelation of God and sole Saviour of all mankind. That is the
significance of Matthew Chapter 1.v1-17, which commences 'Record of the
generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David , the son of Abraham'.
Likewise it is the teaching of John's Prologue 1.v.1-8, which concludes
'Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God but God's
only Son...He has make him known'. Whatever grace, enlightenment and
goodness other religions contain and encourage, and they do so in plenty,
are theirs solely by virtue of the Incarnation, Life, Mission, Death and
Resurrection of Jesus Christ, other than whom and whose teaching and after
whom there is no salvation and revelation. 'That indeed is my faith
because it is the Catholic Faith' (Augustine. de Trinitate 1.7).
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