So, as many of my readers know, I’m a “theist” – a fancy word meaning “I believe in God.” More specifically, I’m a Christian – which to me, is a fancy way of saying “I follow Jesus.” But when I say “I am Christian” as a simple statement of faith, it seems to mean something very different from the many people around me seem to mean when they say “I am Christian.”
Sometimes those people say “I am Christian” in an exclusionary way; sometimes they’re almost defiant. But it rarely seems to mean “I follow Jesus because I believe He’s the Son of God.” Here in the Bible Belt, it usually seems to mean belief that the Bible is literally true, or that evolution is false; other times it seems to mean a firm comittment to the rejection of gay people or excluding women from leadership roles in the Church. I have met people for whom it was literally more important that a preacher condemned gays or rejected the possibility of women priests than it was that that preacher preached the Gospel.
That seems backwards to me. Now, I don’t want to be one of those street preachers who pronounces Jesus as “Jaaayysus” (that’s wrong: Jesus’ actual name was pronounced something like “Yeshua,” which translates to Joseph in modern English) but it seems to me that people who call themselves Christians should always be starting and finishing with Jesus, a kind and forgiving man who nevertheless preached strongly about how people should treat each other better and should act with integrity. The Jesus of the Gospels wouldn’t care whether someone preaching in the pulpit was gay, or a woman, or simply hip with the latest theories of the evolution of humans from earlier hominids through a process of natural selection; Jesus would care whether that person was teaching people to be good to their neighbors and preaching the Gospels.
So I’ve put a lot of thought into what I think the core principles of Christianity are. Now, many people like to focus on doctrine – do you believe in Jesus, are you good to your neighbor as you wish they were to you, do you believe in the Trinity, and so on – but I’m more interested in building the foundations up from a truth perspective. Believing in Jesus and accepting Him as your Lord and Savior so you can receive eternal life is the standard formula, but I don’t think you should believe in Him instrumentally to get eternal life; I think you should believe in Him if you think that your beliefs about Him are actually, like, you know, true.
So here’s what I think the core seven pillars of Christianity are:
- Jesus was a real historical person. Jesus was not “outside history” so that stories about him cannot be discussed or challenged; conversely, atheists who claim that Jesus was not a real historical person are far outside responsible scholarship.
- The miracles of Jesus actually happened. Whether they happened precisely the way recorded in the Gospels isn’t important – when Jesus fed the crowds, does it really matter whether there were 4,000 or 5,000 people present?
- His miracles give us confidence Jesus came back from the dead. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead not just as a cheap stunt, but as a demonstration of His power over death, which He exercised later at the Resurrection.
- Jesus came back from the dead to save us from our sins. The reason Jesus died on the Cross and the reason He came back are two sides of one coin: He sacrificed Himself to atone for our sins, and came back to provide for us a new life.
- Jesus had the authority to do so because He is God. By this point, we have passed beyond what could ever be verified scientifically unless you were there at the Creation of the world – it has to be revealed by God and accepted by faith.
- Jesus left us His Spirit to help guide us to follow His example. Most Christians interpret Father, Son and Holy Spirit as three aspects of one God, which baked the noodle of theologians in the past, but isn’t harder to accept than the wave-particle duality in quantum mechanics.
- Jesus founded a Church which we are called to be a part of. Not only was Jesus a real historical person, He had real historical followers, and the event in which He left His Spirit – Pentecost – galvanized His followers into a Church that continues today.
You’ll note one pillar I don’t list in the core seven: His Church compiled stories of Jesus into Scriptures that are profitable for instruction. That’s because many Christians are mired in false teachings about the literal truth of the Bible or, worse, “sola scriptura,” which argues that the Bible is the only source for Christian doctrine. No. That’s wrong. Jesus’s Church came first, and the Bible is a compilation of the early writings of that group believers, a group who are still acting in the world today. The specific text of the Gideon Bible you find in your hotel room is important – it’s the primary historical text we have to learn about Jesus’s life, and Christians believe it contains within it everything you need to know for salvation – but it is more spiritually important that that member of the Gideons witnessed that book to you because of their faith in Christ, a faith that they wanted to share..
So, in sum, when I say “I am Christian”, I don’t mean that I’m trying to profess a costly set of false beliefs to advertise my membership in an exclusive club. When I say “I am Christian,” I mean I think Jesus was a real historical person, we should believe in Him to be saved, and that we should join with other Christians to celebrate His life and to learn more about Him and His teachings so we can emulate Him in our life and practice.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Lego Chester Cathedral, inside Chester Cathedral, in Chester, England.
