I was trawling the interwebs when I came across this blog post, asking what – at first – looked like a simple question, “What is a Christian?”
While I’ve been thinking for a couple of weeks now, how Christianity isn’t defined by mental assent to a set of doctrinal statements, I had not yet been able to properly articulate what it thus could be.
Then this article came along and really helped me see things in a new light. The parts that really struck me were:
- Of course, the language of “believing” has been part of Christianity from the first century onward. But it didn’t refer primarily to believing the right theological beliefs. It meant something like the English word “beloving.” To believe in God and Jesus was to belove God and Jesus. Namely, it meant to commit one’s self to a relationship of attentiveness and faithfulness. Commitment and fidelity are the ancient meanings of faith and believingEven the two most frequently heard Christian creeds, the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, reflect this understanding. They both begin with the Latin word credo, most commonly translated into English as “I believe.” But the Latin roots of credo mean “I give my heart to.” Of course, both creeds include a list of central Christian convictions. But saying the creed does not mean, “I believe the following affirmations to be literally true.” Rather, it means “I give my heart to God” – and who’s that? The creator of heaven and earth, of all that is. “I give my heart to Jesus – and who’s that? The one we say these things about.
- Christianity is not about “right beliefs.” It is about a change of heart. It is about the transformation of ourselves at that deep level that shapes our vision (how we see), our commitment (our loyalty, allegiance), and our values (how we live).
The author, Marcus Borg, then goes on to outline what a Christian might instead look like, removed from mere mental assent and into a true change of heart. The center of being Christian this becomes:
- A yearning and passion for God. About 1600 years ago, Augustine wrote that our hearts are restless until they find their home in God. Yearning and passion are closely-related, even though the former can mean seeking without yet having found.
- A passion for Jesus. Jesus is for Christians the decisive revelation of God – the decisive epiphany, disclosure, of the character and passion of God embodied in a human life. The centrality of Jesus is what makes Christians Christian. To explain by comparison: Jews find the decisive revelation of God in the Torah, Muslims in the Quran. Christians find it in Jesus – in a person, not in a book. That is not about superiority, but about definitional difference. For Christians to affirm that we find it in Jesus does not require denying that God is known elsewhere. Of course, a book, the Bible, is also revelation for Christians. But for Christians, Jesus trumps the Bible.
- Compassion. Compassion is the central virtue of a life centered in God as known in Jesus. When Jesus in a few words summarized theology and ethics, the character of God and how we should live, he said, “Be compassionate as God is compassionate” (Luke 6.36; most English translations read “Be merciful as God is merciful,” but that is misleading given the common modern English meaning of “merciful”).Compassion and love in the Bible often mean the same thing (for example, when Paul names the greatest of the spiritual gifts as “love”), but compassion has a richer metaphorical meaning. In Hebrew and Aramaic, it is related to the word for “womb.” God is “womb-like,” giving birth to us, nourishing us, and feels for us (and the whole of creation) as a mother feels for the children of her womb: willing our well-being, and sometimes becoming fierce when our well-being (and the well-being of creation) is threatened. We are to be compassionate as God is compassionate. Importantly, compassion is not only a feeling but a doing. The imperative is not simply to feel compassion but to “be compassionate”- to act in accord with the feeling.
- A passion for the transformation of this world. Compassion – love – in the Bible has a social form. It is about participating in God’s passion for a world of justice and peace. Together, they are “the dream of God,” God’s dream for what the humanly-constructed worlds of societies and nations and cultures should be like. Justice is not about punitive or criminal justice, but about the fair distribution of God’s earth, for the earth belongs to God (Psalm 24). It is about economics: everybody should have enough of the material necessities of life, not simply through charity but as the product of the way the social system is put together. Peace is about the end of violence and war.
Being Christian is about being captivated by these passions. They are not beliefs as much as they are convictions and commitments. That’s what being Christian is about. It is about the heart and its convictions and commitments.
Amen.
WorshipfulLeigh 