What is Christianity?

Let’s start with a few things that it isn’t. It isn’t an alternative explanation of the universe. It isn’t a code of moral rules. It isn’t a ‘teaching’ or some set of ‘values.’ Nor is it the belief that everything is the work of a huge, undetectable superbeing who lurks around the back of the world and whom we call ‘God.’ It is not a superstition about invisible beings.

Christianity is a response to historical events, the events to do with Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus lived between 4BC and 29AD in the then Roman province of Judea. He was a Jew, not a Christian. His followers called him a teacher. In his teaching and his healing, he embodied a new relationship between humanity and God, a relationship so new that it changed people’s understanding of what ‘God’ meant.

Jesus called God ‘Father,’ or even, on occasions, ‘Dad.’ Without confusing himself with God, he knew that his life was in loving continuity with God’s life. He told his followers that whoever had seen him had seen the Father. He offered them this same closeness to the Father who was the source of love; not to a cosmic superpower, but to One whose kingdom was already there in their hearts. This kingdom, which is always entering the world, is stronger than the powers of the world: stronger than sin, stronger than death.

So much might have remained the benign teaching of a religious reformer. But what Jesus did is more important than what he taught. He knew that the test of his unity with God was whether it could withstand the evil of the world and the cruelty of death. If his life had been based on a mistake, then death would show it. Accused of blasphemy by the religious leaders, he was executed by crucifixion. On the cross, in desperate loneliness, he spoke a line from one of the psalms: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” At that moment he entered the lowest depths of human terror and abandonment.

Jesus really died on the cross. He was as dead as anyone ever is. But then two things happened. First, his followers were shocked to realise that though they had seen him die, he was still with them, speaking to them, encouraging them, even eating with them. Second, these events forced them to believe that everything to do with Jesus—his living, his dying, his return from the dead—was more than the work of a teacher or prophet. These were the actions of God himself. In a way that they could only begin to understand, it was God who had given himself to and for humanity. From here on, they would have to think of God differently.

Then began a long period of reassessment of what ‘God’ meant. The outcome—after about four hundred years—was to say that the truest knowledge that humanity has of God is Jesus. In Jesus, God is no longer the remote ruler, the supernatural judge. He has made us the gift of his own being. He has lived our life and died our death. And in sharing that death, he has overcome death.

To be a Christian is not to believe that everything in the Bible is beyond question, or that God made the world in six days, or even that God ignited the Big Bang. It is not to believe that God runs an eternal punishment cell for gays and divorcees. It is to take Christ’s living and dying and living again as the key to who we are and who God is. It is to share Christ’s faith that God is close and loving, and that his being is open to our being. It is to belong to the community, the Church, that seeks to live through these truths.

You join the Church, not by signing on the dotted line under the creeds, but by baptism, in which you acknowledge Christ as the human face of God and commit yourself to living your life alongside him. You do that by taking part in the central celebration of his reality, the Eucharist. There, week by week, Christ gives himself again, and the Church enters the life of the God who in Jesus shared our life and our death, and who, by the resurrection, showed that love, not death, has the final word.

You may have had a bad experience of religion in the past. You may feel that what is described briefly here is not the Christianity that you have been offered before. You might want to talk to one of the clergy in your parish - perhaps on the basis of what you have read here. They may not agree with every word. But you can be sure they will be happy to talk.