What Makes … a Christian?

One of the advantages of my consciously stepping back from a day-to-day focus on the machinations of the Trump Administration is that it has enabled me to read across a wider gamut of my long-term mental reading checklist.  Over the last couple of months – entirely by coincidence; no Armageddon in mind 😊 – I happened to pick up a series of volumes addressing when and by whom the Christian Gospels were written – which in fact is a story of how Christianity evolved in the decades after the Lord’s death.  I had been intending to work a number of those volumes’ authors’ premises into this Christmas message.

As I labored to blend what I had said in the past with what I had recently learned, the result was becoming unduly long and unwieldy (I know, I know – it’s never seemed to bother me before. 😉)  Even so, it seemed best to return to a discussion of these authors’ assertions at some point in the near future, with a suitable introductory warning for those that have no interest.  In the meantime, some of you who might be willing to wade through that post when it is published can consider it a Holiday gift from the Noise that you will have no need to determine whether you have the sufficient internal fortitude to take it on until after the Holidays. 

A second major reason I decided to defer a major discussion is that my recent reading has arguably increased my knowledge without markedly altering my own fundamental beliefs expressed here in earlier notes.  What follows are excerpts from a post that I have published here in 2023 and 2024, including the “preliminary note.”  Since the edits I’ve made from the earlier Holiday posts in no way alter its substance, I am going to take the liberty of not indicating them.  May you have wonderful and blessed Holidays with family and friends.          

[A preliminary note:  my comments below will undoubtedly reflect my Roman Catholic training, and may not relate exactly to all Christian faiths.]

As Christmas is upon us, I’ve reflected upon what I think makes … a Christian.  Traditional Christian theology holds that Jesus of Nazareth was God made man, conceived in the womb of a virgin without sin, who came into the world to teach us an affirmative life of love (as a complement rather than as a contradiction to Judaic law, which I understand tends to focus on prohibitions), and willingly died as a sacrifice to God the Father as expiation for the sins of humankind.  His themes as recorded in the Gospels – what Christians call, “the Good News” — are compelling but relatively few.  What theologians have erected upon them over the last two millennia can be likened to an exponentially mushrooming coral reef. 

I’m pretty confident that the hierarchy of my Roman Catholic Church would take significant issue with some of what follows; they might well consider me a fallen-away Catholic, perhaps even a fallen-away Christian.  That’s as may be.  One tenet that I am confident that religious scholars of most if not all faiths agree upon:  each of us is responsible for his/her own soul.  I personally would add another tenet, with which many of these worthies might not agree:  That those of us who claim to believe in Him can, at best, only do what we have faith He wants.  During the last 60 years – let alone the last 2000 years — there have been Popes who have had such different theological emphases that such differences have seemed to come precariously close to differences in kind.  I don’t see how those of us with no claim to infallibility can expect to have any greater degree of enlightenment or unanimity.

The strictest view of Christianity is that followed by those who rigidly adhere to all of the dictates of the hierarchy of their given Christian Church.  (Some – including Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Mike Johnson – maintain that they are following the Bible’s precepts.  I respectfully disagree.  The Bible can be cited for just about anything anybody wants.  It’s a Church’s elders who decide which of the Bible’s passages will be emphasized, which ignored.)  From the Roman Catholic perspective, strict Catholics would be those whose beliefs include, as the Church hierarchy declares:  that the physical expression of homosexual love is a sin; that Mary, the Mother of Jesus – for whom I have the deepest reverence — was not only a virgin when the Lord was conceived in her womb, but was ever-virgin (i.e., never engaged in sexual relations despite the fact that she was a married woman); that women are inherently unqualified to be priests; and that it is a sin to fail to attend Mass on the Church’s designated Holy Days of Obligation.

Abiding by a set of such rules is the correct approach for some.  Everyone finds spiritual solace in his or her own way.  Not all can be as unquestioning of church elders’ pronouncements.

A second, less formalistic view holds that Jesus is the Son of God, but that the Lord’s fundamental message focused little on legalisms and mostly on love.  Jesus did seemingly pay lesser heed to ritualistic observance of religious rules:  “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites!  You lock the kingdom of heaven before human beings.”  (Matthews 23: 13); “Who among you, if your son or ox falls into a cistern, would not [despite Judaic law] immediately pull him out on the Sabbath day?”  (Luke 14: 5).  This at first does appear to provide a theological safety net for those reluctant to abide by rigid dictates; that said, the core of the Lord’s teaching, while simple, is in fact exceedingly challenging in our competitive, materialistic (capitalistic? 😉 ) culture:  “You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.  This is the greatest and the first commandment.  The second is like it:  You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  (Matthew 22: 37 – 39); “[L]ove your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.  To the person who strikes you on one cheek, offer the other one as well, and from the person who takes your cloak, do not withhold even your tunic.  Give to everyone who asks of you, and from the one who takes what is yours do not demand it back.  Do to others as you would have them do to you.”  (Luke 6: 27-31); “[I]t is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for one who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 19: 24).  Finally, when one analyzes it perhaps the most perilous line in all of Scripture, recited by rote by millions of Christians every day:  “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us [Emphasis added].”

If you’re shifting a bit in your chair as you’re reminded of these, you’re not alone.  These teachings are something to strive for – while setting an unnerving standard.

Finally:  Does one have to believe that Jesus was God in order to be considered a Christian?  I suspect that the hierarchy of every Christian denomination would answer resoundingly in the affirmative, many presumably quoting John 14: 6:  “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.’ [Emphasis Added].”  Put aside the fact that biblical scholars agree that John was the last Gospel written, and that John reports Jesus as affirmatively declaring his divinity in a manner that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, written closer in time to Jesus’ life, fail to record.  (I think biblical scholars also agree that none of the Gospels were written by the men to whom they are respectively attributed.)  Even so:  Is the way to salvation only through Him, or can it be through living His message (whether or not one is even aware that it was His message)?  Have the deceased human beings who have lived existences of caring and giving  — among them, Jews, Muslims, those subscribing to Eastern faiths, indigenous peoples around the world, and those who follow no specific faith – been condemned because they have/had either never heard of Jesus or do/did not accept his divinity?

I reject the notion that a loving God could be so harsh to so many of the creatures He has brought forth. 

At the same time, we are all in need forgiveness.  Our faith lies in the confidence that the Almighty will look past our transgressions if we try hard enough.

“But when they continued asking him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’  … [T]hey went away one by one, beginning with the elders.  So he was left alone with the woman before him.  Then Jesus … said to her, ‘Woman, where are they?  Has no one condemned you?’  She replied, “No one, sir.’  Then Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you.  Go, and from now on sin no more.’”  (John 8: 7 – 11).

Not sinning in the future is probably not a realistic expectation for most of us; trying to live a more giving life perhaps is.  So to all Christians – which I would submit includes all of those of any or no faith who are trying to live in accordance with the principles the Lord set forth:

Merry Christmas and a Blessed New Year.