Who is a Christian?
I don’t know how closely some of you read my writing, but you may have noticed that I’ve again started going to church. You may have also noted my continued insistence that I am not Christian. The implication, then, is that I believe that simply going to church does not a Christian make. So, what does?
I’ve looked at how the term “Christian” is defined by those that say they are Christians, which has been an informative undertaking. The first thing we can say is that there is no universally accepted definition for the term. Rather, the term Christianity is defined along the same lines as criteria for membership into an exclusive club. A Baptist preacher may ask you, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” Your answer to this question will determine whether or not he will allow you to join his club, or, in the alternative, as was my case, he will wish you well on your path to eternal damnation. A Catholic priest may ask you, “Have you been baptized under the Trinity in the Roman Catholic Church?” Other definitions may be premised on whether or not you have received the grace of the Lord, whether or not you have turned away from sin, whether or not you have entered into a friendship with Jesus, whether or not your heart is imbued with the Holy Spirit, whether or not you accept the New and Old testaments as God’s revelation, or any combination of these and others.
It appears that most definitions focus on what you believe, rather than what you do. If addressed at all, what you do is, at most, given subordinate importance; most often, if is left out entirely. This is most apparent with creed-centered definitions of Christianity. These definitions seem to take a verbatim line or two directly out of a Church’s creed, usually the Nicene or Apostle’s. They will ask you, for instance, whether or not you believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God (Nicene, line 6), whether or not we are saved through him (line 13), whether or not he was of a virgin birth (line 16), whether or not he was resurrected in fulfillment of prophecy (line 20), etc. (A survey of these definitions and others can be found here at the Religious Tolerance website. )
I believe that creed-centered definitions of Christianity are largely a vestige of the early years of the Church, when such matters of faith were wholly unsettled, and, as such, they are largely an historical accident. The council at Nicea met, in large part, to address the divinity of Christ, which, presumably, was still up for debate, by then, some 300 years after his death. After Nicea decreed that Jesus was, indeed, divine, another council convened at Constantinople to reconcile this divinity with his humanity. Still another council met at Ephesus to address the nature of Mary, and still another to address the nature of the Holy Spirit, and so on. By this time, we were some five or six hundred years into the “Era of the Lord.” The findings of these various councils were codified in Creeds or the like and belief or non-belief in them separated Christians who belonged to the fledgling Catholic Church, which history shows would win out in the end, from the Christian “heretics” that did not. That which lives on in these creeds, and that which is reflected in creed-centered definitions of Christianity, then, is not a reflection of the views of all early-Christians, nor even of Jesus Christ himself, but instead, they document the points of disconnect, rather than the points of overlap, between the Catholic Church and the various competing positions as they existed some 1,500 to 2,000 years ago or at least several hundred years ago during the less distant schisms of the once Holy Roman Empire.
That is to say, rather than focus on the heart of what it means to be Christian – that which united all Christians and still does – the definitions focus on the very outer layer of what it means to be Christian, the point at which subtle difference arise between one mode of reckoning and another. While it was perhaps understandable, or at least forgivable, for the early church to be consumed with such subtle differences, it is largely anachronistic for us to continue to do so today. To premise the main thrust of Christianity in general on the few sectarian differences we have, then or now, I would argue, is to miss the point almost entirely.
But understanding Christianity as a set of beliefs, as opposed to, for instance, a lived experience, leaves one open to far greater pitfalls than the largely academic point raised above. One need only recall that some of the greatest injustices the world over have been committed under The Cross in the name of Jesus Christ. The living history of the Church was, and continues to be, a bloody tale. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu points out, “It was Christians, you know, not Pagans, who were responsible for the Holocaust. It was Christians, not Pagans, who lynched people here in the South, who burned people at the stake, frequently in the name of this Jesus Christ.” Tutu’s description does not even make mention of the Crusades, Inquisitions, the various other attempts at violent proselytization, nor the myriad Christian justifications once given for slavery or the oppression of women. As philosopher Blaise Pascal once cautioned, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” History has been Pascal’s witness. And it is an observation similar to Pascal’s which led Ghandi to say of Christianity, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” What these three criticism have in common is that unlike most definitions of Christianity, they focus on the acts of man, rather than his beliefs.
What good are any of our religious beliefs, in Christ or otherwise, if we simply use them to bludgeon one another? What good is the practice of any religion, if it too easily becomes a practice of hatred, intolerance, and violence?
Curiously, the historical Christ himself spent little, if any, time discussing most of the questions that many Christians now hold to be the central tenets of their belief. Indeed, we know very little, if anything, about what Jesus Christ himself believed. For instance, he was reluctant to address the question of his divinity, made no mention of the virginity of his mother, left it unclear whether his resurrection would be bodily or spiritual, made no mention of the Holy Trinity, made no promise that his disciples would inerrantly record and re-tell his story, and indeed, he left it wholly unclear what role, if any, your beliefs in any of these matters had in your salvation. Moreover, there is even the suggestion that Jesus was intentionally evasive and unclear about such things, so that we would not know what to believe! Still, somehow, most Christians seem to think that following Jesus is “about” a few particular beliefs in God, of which Jesus himself was largely silent, vague, or contradictory.
I, having seen its effect throughout history and in the present day, have a hard time subscribing to such a view of Christianity. Christianity should not be viewed as a club to which you gain membership if you meet certain standards of belief. One should not “become” Christian the moment one decides to write one’s name on a roster and pay membership dues to a local church or attend service in a particular building once a week. Such an “in the club” or “out of the club” mentality is precisely that which allows those “in” the club to hate, oppress, and exact violence against those “outside” of it.
I’ve already hinted that I believe Christianity should be defined, ideally speaking, as an action-centered-way-of-life, something which is to be practiced, not arrived at. Indeed, such a view comports nicely with Jesus’ actual teachings and practice. Jesus teaches that the two most important laws are these: (1) love your God and (2) love your neighbor as yourself. In exploring what it means to ‘love your God,’ John writes, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.” Elsewhere, Jesus tells us, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” That is to say, the manner by which Christendom will be announced to the world, or in another word, defined, is the love Christians have for their brothers. To the extent that Christianity is reducible to definition, it should be thus: the attempt by man to emulate God’s love for us by loving our fellow man.
Not only would such a definition better comport with Jesus’ actual teachings, its practice would avoid many of the pitfalls that has beset creed-centered conceptions of Christianity for the past two millennia. Of course, I don’t believe that such a view will have any traction. After all, healing the world with love is not nearly as profitable a venture as selling faith and church doctrine to those clamoring simply to get into heaven. Preaching the Golden Rule will not make men rich, nor with it build empires. Founding religions on blind faith in the incomprehensible, however, seems to have the opposite effect. Simply loving one another has never been enough, and the lure of far off heavens with streets paved in gold, and hope of divine intercession in the way of trumpet bearing angels, and trying to put one’s faith in logically contradictory church doctrine of which no man can make any sense at all have each proven to be too seductive for man to resist. But one has to wonder if God will not say of it, “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.”
So, how is a Christian to be defined? Put it this way. I like to think that, if there is such a place as heaven, someone like Ghandi would be there, even though he did not believe in the God of Abraham, nor did he confess to the teachings of any Christian Church. Ironically, by his own admission, he wasn’t a Christian, but, in my mind at least, he was, nevertheless, such a good example of what a Christian should be. Ghandi had a pure heart and loved his fellow man much like the historical Jesus. Should it really be of any consequence that he subscribed to a different set of beliefs? Should it really be of any consequence that he did not say the right thing? No. Let the heart of a man be the seat for his God, let it also be his measure. Words, and doctrines, and professions of belief and all things originating from the lips - of these things the hearts of man place little value, and in these things the gods of man put little Faith.
I’ve looked at how the term “Christian” is defined by those that say they are Christians, which has been an informative undertaking. The first thing we can say is that there is no universally accepted definition for the term. Rather, the term Christianity is defined along the same lines as criteria for membership into an exclusive club. A Baptist preacher may ask you, “Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” Your answer to this question will determine whether or not he will allow you to join his club, or, in the alternative, as was my case, he will wish you well on your path to eternal damnation. A Catholic priest may ask you, “Have you been baptized under the Trinity in the Roman Catholic Church?” Other definitions may be premised on whether or not you have received the grace of the Lord, whether or not you have turned away from sin, whether or not you have entered into a friendship with Jesus, whether or not your heart is imbued with the Holy Spirit, whether or not you accept the New and Old testaments as God’s revelation, or any combination of these and others.
It appears that most definitions focus on what you believe, rather than what you do. If addressed at all, what you do is, at most, given subordinate importance; most often, if is left out entirely. This is most apparent with creed-centered definitions of Christianity. These definitions seem to take a verbatim line or two directly out of a Church’s creed, usually the Nicene or Apostle’s. They will ask you, for instance, whether or not you believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God (Nicene, line 6), whether or not we are saved through him (line 13), whether or not he was of a virgin birth (line 16), whether or not he was resurrected in fulfillment of prophecy (line 20), etc. (A survey of these definitions and others can be found here at the Religious Tolerance website. )
I believe that creed-centered definitions of Christianity are largely a vestige of the early years of the Church, when such matters of faith were wholly unsettled, and, as such, they are largely an historical accident. The council at Nicea met, in large part, to address the divinity of Christ, which, presumably, was still up for debate, by then, some 300 years after his death. After Nicea decreed that Jesus was, indeed, divine, another council convened at Constantinople to reconcile this divinity with his humanity. Still another council met at Ephesus to address the nature of Mary, and still another to address the nature of the Holy Spirit, and so on. By this time, we were some five or six hundred years into the “Era of the Lord.” The findings of these various councils were codified in Creeds or the like and belief or non-belief in them separated Christians who belonged to the fledgling Catholic Church, which history shows would win out in the end, from the Christian “heretics” that did not. That which lives on in these creeds, and that which is reflected in creed-centered definitions of Christianity, then, is not a reflection of the views of all early-Christians, nor even of Jesus Christ himself, but instead, they document the points of disconnect, rather than the points of overlap, between the Catholic Church and the various competing positions as they existed some 1,500 to 2,000 years ago or at least several hundred years ago during the less distant schisms of the once Holy Roman Empire.
That is to say, rather than focus on the heart of what it means to be Christian – that which united all Christians and still does – the definitions focus on the very outer layer of what it means to be Christian, the point at which subtle difference arise between one mode of reckoning and another. While it was perhaps understandable, or at least forgivable, for the early church to be consumed with such subtle differences, it is largely anachronistic for us to continue to do so today. To premise the main thrust of Christianity in general on the few sectarian differences we have, then or now, I would argue, is to miss the point almost entirely.
But understanding Christianity as a set of beliefs, as opposed to, for instance, a lived experience, leaves one open to far greater pitfalls than the largely academic point raised above. One need only recall that some of the greatest injustices the world over have been committed under The Cross in the name of Jesus Christ. The living history of the Church was, and continues to be, a bloody tale. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu points out, “It was Christians, you know, not Pagans, who were responsible for the Holocaust. It was Christians, not Pagans, who lynched people here in the South, who burned people at the stake, frequently in the name of this Jesus Christ.” Tutu’s description does not even make mention of the Crusades, Inquisitions, the various other attempts at violent proselytization, nor the myriad Christian justifications once given for slavery or the oppression of women. As philosopher Blaise Pascal once cautioned, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” History has been Pascal’s witness. And it is an observation similar to Pascal’s which led Ghandi to say of Christianity, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” What these three criticism have in common is that unlike most definitions of Christianity, they focus on the acts of man, rather than his beliefs.
What good are any of our religious beliefs, in Christ or otherwise, if we simply use them to bludgeon one another? What good is the practice of any religion, if it too easily becomes a practice of hatred, intolerance, and violence?
Curiously, the historical Christ himself spent little, if any, time discussing most of the questions that many Christians now hold to be the central tenets of their belief. Indeed, we know very little, if anything, about what Jesus Christ himself believed. For instance, he was reluctant to address the question of his divinity, made no mention of the virginity of his mother, left it unclear whether his resurrection would be bodily or spiritual, made no mention of the Holy Trinity, made no promise that his disciples would inerrantly record and re-tell his story, and indeed, he left it wholly unclear what role, if any, your beliefs in any of these matters had in your salvation. Moreover, there is even the suggestion that Jesus was intentionally evasive and unclear about such things, so that we would not know what to believe! Still, somehow, most Christians seem to think that following Jesus is “about” a few particular beliefs in God, of which Jesus himself was largely silent, vague, or contradictory.
I, having seen its effect throughout history and in the present day, have a hard time subscribing to such a view of Christianity. Christianity should not be viewed as a club to which you gain membership if you meet certain standards of belief. One should not “become” Christian the moment one decides to write one’s name on a roster and pay membership dues to a local church or attend service in a particular building once a week. Such an “in the club” or “out of the club” mentality is precisely that which allows those “in” the club to hate, oppress, and exact violence against those “outside” of it.
I’ve already hinted that I believe Christianity should be defined, ideally speaking, as an action-centered-way-of-life, something which is to be practiced, not arrived at. Indeed, such a view comports nicely with Jesus’ actual teachings and practice. Jesus teaches that the two most important laws are these: (1) love your God and (2) love your neighbor as yourself. In exploring what it means to ‘love your God,’ John writes, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.” Elsewhere, Jesus tells us, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” That is to say, the manner by which Christendom will be announced to the world, or in another word, defined, is the love Christians have for their brothers. To the extent that Christianity is reducible to definition, it should be thus: the attempt by man to emulate God’s love for us by loving our fellow man.
Not only would such a definition better comport with Jesus’ actual teachings, its practice would avoid many of the pitfalls that has beset creed-centered conceptions of Christianity for the past two millennia. Of course, I don’t believe that such a view will have any traction. After all, healing the world with love is not nearly as profitable a venture as selling faith and church doctrine to those clamoring simply to get into heaven. Preaching the Golden Rule will not make men rich, nor with it build empires. Founding religions on blind faith in the incomprehensible, however, seems to have the opposite effect. Simply loving one another has never been enough, and the lure of far off heavens with streets paved in gold, and hope of divine intercession in the way of trumpet bearing angels, and trying to put one’s faith in logically contradictory church doctrine of which no man can make any sense at all have each proven to be too seductive for man to resist. But one has to wonder if God will not say of it, “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.”
So, how is a Christian to be defined? Put it this way. I like to think that, if there is such a place as heaven, someone like Ghandi would be there, even though he did not believe in the God of Abraham, nor did he confess to the teachings of any Christian Church. Ironically, by his own admission, he wasn’t a Christian, but, in my mind at least, he was, nevertheless, such a good example of what a Christian should be. Ghandi had a pure heart and loved his fellow man much like the historical Jesus. Should it really be of any consequence that he subscribed to a different set of beliefs? Should it really be of any consequence that he did not say the right thing? No. Let the heart of a man be the seat for his God, let it also be his measure. Words, and doctrines, and professions of belief and all things originating from the lips - of these things the hearts of man place little value, and in these things the gods of man put little Faith.
posted by Donkey Boy at Friday, July 27, 2007
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