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An issue for many people in our time is whether they in good conscience can call themselves Christians anymore. Oh, they acknowledge that they have roots in the Jewish-Christian tradition. They know that their cultural and ethical life has been largely shaped by that tradition. Yet they also know that many of the stated beliefs associated with the Christian faith have lost meaning for them. “To me, the doctrines of the Trinity, Original Sin, Predestination, the Atonement,” a friend protested, “are phantoms. I don’t even know what they mean; I doubt if I ever did. I suppose that I never really was a Christian.” And doesn’t this highlight the heart of the problem? Is it possible to consider oneself a Christian if one no longer believes in the most significant dogmas which historically cluster about that term? In short, what does it mean to be a Christian in today’s world?
Now I know that even to put such a question is irksome to some Unitarian Universalists. They believe that they have moved beyond Christianity, whatever that means. But I want to suggest that there is a sense in which the Christian equation is essential to our comprehension of who we are and what we are meant to be. For many of us it is absolutely fundamental to our understanding of our faith and life commitment. Therefore, I propose that we wrestle briefly with the name “Christian.” Let’s examine it by walking about its perimeter. Let’s see what meaning it has for us.
I.
There are two fundamental stances we can take toward the world Christian. One is creedal. That is, we can say that Christianity primarily means proclaiming certain doctrines. Above all else, it calls for believing and reciting the Apostles or Nicene Creed or some other set of propositions about Jesus, God and the Bible. If we can say that Jesus was born of a virgin, or that the Godhead is composed of three persons, or that the Bible is God’s infallible word, then we can properly call ourselves Christian. It’s that simple. Over the years, of course, this has been the viewpoint of much of orthodox Christianity. In point of fact, it remains the grounds upon which many in our day continue to separate Christians from non-Christians. The World Council of Churches, for all its liberality, still clings to such a creedal mentality. Only those national denominations which affirm “Jesus Christ as God and Savior” are admitted to its constituency. Other than institutional size, this proposition is the sole criterion for membership. No doubt it has been just such belief-tests which have soured many Unitarian Universalists. They look on the religious life as a pilgrimage. Consequently they shy away from restrictive formulations that neatly define who is “in” and who is “out.” “If this is what Christianity entails,” they say, “we want no part of it.”
But there is another approach to the word “Christian.” Oddly enough, it has biblical roots. It is interesting that the term Christian appears only three times in the New Testament (Acts 11:25, 26:28; I Peter 4:16). In each instance, the term denotes discipleship. It is a designation for those who are followers of the Christos, the Christ. In the biblical passages in which the name is mentioned, Christianity is presented as a way of life. It is seen as referring to a community of people committed to remembering Jesus and to living in faith and practice as Jesus inspired them to live. This doesn’t mean that the early Christians didn’t have specific ideas about who Jesus was and what he meant to their world. There was a whole host of such ideas. But it does mean that the emphasis was not mainly an intellectual assent to a pre-packaged collection of theological propositions. Rather the stress was on commitment to a person and to the changes that person was able to bring in the way people thought about and lived out their lives. Doctrinal considerations were important but of secondary importance. As far as we know, there were few, if any, creedal tests. Declaring Jesus to be Lord, the ultimately decisive reference point in one’s understanding of the God-human relationship, was usually sufficient. The earliest Christian churches were open to all who professed a loyalty to Jesus (albeit as earthly Lord and Lord-to-come) and the particular life-way he illumined.
If Jesus had lived to see his church flourish, I suspect that this close to how he would have wanted it. Time and time again he warned his followers that how they lived was significantly more important than the dogmas they asserted. “Not everyone who says to he ‘Lord, Lord’” he told them, “shall enter the kingdom of heaven but he who does the will of my father who is in heaven.” Event and parable in Jesus’ life stress this point. The “rich young ruler” falls short of God’s kingdom. He does so not because he fails to proclaim the right beliefs – he proclaims them all; he carefully lives up to the letter of the law. He falls short for one reason only. He refuses to give of what he has to those in need. He refuses to part with his wealth. He lacks the dimension of the charitable heart. Then there is the parable of the “great Surprise,” of the “Sheep and the Goats,” as it is better know. Here Jesus informs his hearers that God, on the Judgment Day, will not automatically bless those who prophesy in the Lord’s name or those who have learned to “Cast out demons” or to do magical works. If that’s all they do, they aren’t welcome. Rather it is those who give food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, shelter to the homeless, clothes to the naked, succor to the poor, help to the ill, hope to the imprisoned – they’re the blessed ones. They’re the ones who sit on the right hand of heaven’s king.
Then there is the criticism Jesus heaps upon the Scribes and Pharisees. It in part centers on this very issue. Here is a group of men who, while updating the Law for their times, still hold tenaciously and meticulously to it. They believe all the right things. They go to the synagogue regularly. They offer the proper sacrifices at the temple on the High Holy Days. They pray faithfully. They are the genuinely pious of their day. Yet, apparently some of them lack the major ingredient that might bring them close to God: they fail to put justice and mercy ahead of other things. They lack the compassionate spirit.
At numerous points the remainder of the New Testament latches on to a similar theme Paul speaks of Christians being called to create within themselves the gracious “mind” and “heart” of Christ Jesus. John writes about it being people’s chief task to love their fellow humans as the God, who Christ reveals, has loved them. The unknown author of the Epistle of First John speaks of it being impossible for the Christian to love God and then to hate one’s fellow human beings: For “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him.” James follows Jesus and speaks of confirming our faith through our works, of being doers of the word, not hearers only, of fulfilling God’s purposes for us through the just and kindly act. From beginning to end the stress is on that servant-love, disclosed by Christ, as the royal way of life. Christianity is viewed as discipleship to him who commanded us faithfully to love God and others. The emphasis, except for a few isolated passages, is not one of “Believe the right doctrine, learn it, repeat it, and you shall be saved.” Not at all! The focus is quite different. It is far more a call that says, “Come, trust that your life can be made new. Do so by responding to Jesus as a person. Learn how his life points to how you should live yours. Incarnate in yourself that grace-filled spirit which was the guiding reality for him so that it might become the guiding reality for you. Improvise your life around what was the central feature of his life.
II.
Now I don’t know about you, but this idea that Christianity is a response to a person who gives us a definite vision of how we are to live out our days on earth is extremely helpful to me. When I say that I am a Christian, I am not saying that I accept all the doctrines which have accumulated about Jesus of Nazareth over the past two thousand years. When pressed, I find that, like most people, I accept some of them and reject others. Even those I accept have sometimes been radically reinterpreted. Nor am I saying that the particular world view the Galilean believed in with its “heaven above” and “Gehenna” or “hell below” is a live option for me. What I am saying is that Jesus of Nazareth, when the accretions are “stripped off,” still remains for me the basic symbol of what it means to be fully human. His life is the door through which I seek to interpret what my life ought to be. He points to an understanding of my place in the universe. He indicates what my relatedness to each of you and to all humankind is about. By so doing, he helps me make sense out of this strange complexity I call human existence.
Let me illustrate what I mean by considering three pictures of life’s meaning which our world currently paints for us. The first picture is of a world of incredible technological and scientific achievement. It is a world of great cities, speed, power and wealth, a world of unprecedented breakthroughs in biology, chemistry, physics and medicine. It is a world in which Nature is continually surrendering up her mysteries to the knowledge and inventive skill of the human mind. Not only have people learned how to travel the seas and skies as well as their native habitat, the land; but they have gained the capacity to leave their terrestrial globe behind them for new, unexplored worlds. Technologically and scientifically, we say, a Golden Age, at least the dawn of such an age, is upon us; and we rejoice in its arrival. This is one picture we have. For some, however, it is reality’s only picture. It is the vision of a world, even a universe, waiting to be subdued, manipulated and controlled. It is a picture of existence subject to the dominance of human power.
Consider now a second picture. At first glance it appears to be a radically different one. It is a picture of people living in isolation. Alienated from their fellow human beings, they continually erect barriers of hostility based on racial, national, class, ethnic and religious demarcations. It is a picture of the human family engaged in massive, violent power struggles. It is a picture where war, poverty, racial, political, economic and social injustices are prevalent features. It is a picture of a fearful and tumultuous world continually teetering on the brink of chaos, convulsion and final extinction,
Now think about the sense in which these two pictures are intimately entwined. If we seek nothing but the manipulation of existence, if we never transcend the desire for technological and scientific dominance, if the passion to subdue becomes the be-all and end-all of our value system, then we inevitably inherit the second kind of world. It becomes the ultimate prize in our obsessive pursuit of the first. The result? We become the eventual victims of our own aggressiveness. Because we have put our trust exclusively in our skill and power to get us what we want, we end up making our own personal and collective bedlam. Because we use our science and technology for self-aggrandizing purposes and that predominantly, we end up creating a world of suspicion and distrust. And let’s face it. For how many this has been the telling ingredient in their life stance!
But doesn’t life offer us another kind of picture? Only this time it is not one of the ruling attitudes governing our “grab and keep” civilization. Quite the opposite in fact! It’s the story-picture of a very special person. It’s the picture of a rather obscure human being who nevertheless confronts his world with a peculiar appeal and power. It’s the picture of an itinerate preacher who in his few years on earth seeks to tear down some of the phony barriers which have set Jew against Gentile, Pharisee against publican, the religiously correct against the ecclesiastical backslider. It’s the picture of one whose passion for justice and mercy leads him to denounce the hardheartedness of the rich toward the poor, the tyranny of the powerful over the powerless, a passion that eventually costs him his life. It’s the picture of one reaching out and lifting up life, wherever he meets it, and filling it with significance. The emotionally distraught, the physically diseased, the self-doubting Pharisee, the tax collector outcast, the repentant prostitute, the mourning widow, the working and non-working poor – he sees worth in them all and works to give their lives a new purpose. For him life’s goal is finding one’s kinship with God by discovering how to become fully human. It involves finding the depth of the Holy – the presence of the transforming God – revealed in the life people share with one another. On the human side of things, that means substituting other-regarding for self-regarding. It means learning how to be the merciful neighbor. It means losing one’s self in an ever broadening, deepening concern for others. It means helping people free themselves from their crippling sense of worthlessness. If demanded, it means choosing the way of opting for a cross, if that is what life requires. In other words, instead of looking our for Number 1, it means responding to the call to be a genuine, active servant presence in the world of broken and needful men and women,
It is this third picture of what human existence means that Jesus of Nazareth offers us. The reason he remains a decisive, compelling symbol in the faith of most of us is that he stands as a towering reminder of the love, the forgiveness, the tenderness, and the compassion our humanity at its best expects of us. He reminds us that it is only as we shape our lives around the various shapes of our neighbor’s need that our world, to say nothing of ourselves, will be saved. Granted, most of us fall short – tragically short – of this vision of humanness that the Man from Nazareth holds before our eyes. We want to flee it. Like Peter, we want it to be taken away from us. Why? We know that its demands are great. We know that we will never fully be what we are urged to become. Nevertheless the fact remains: that vision continues to haunt us and intrigue us. In spite of the passage of nearly two millennia, the Galilean has a way of reaching across the centuries. He has a way of bidding us to be the persons we know deep down we are meant to be. As such, he stands at the focal point of our understanding of reality – not because later theologians made him God but because he continues, even after all this time, to point the way to what it means to be most profoundly and thoroughly human.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the twentieth century German martyr, caught this idea when he wrote: “To be a Christian does not mean to be religious in a particular way [by that he meant in a special church sense] but…to be human…to participate in the suffering of God in the life of the world…Jesus does not call people to a new religion, but to life.” It is this vision of our essential humanness that Jesus gives us. It is a vision that makes the love of God and the love of humanity two sides of the same depth experience, two poles of the same reality.
And it is in this third picture of life that we find hope – the assurance that our world can make it through its terrible frustrations and tribulations. The other two pictures possess no reconciling hope at all; their way is the way of despair and death. So in a very real sense Jesus of Nazareth becomes, for those who follow him, the symbol of hope’s promise at life’s center.
III.
Thus, when all is said and done, Christianity is not a set of propositions to be jammed down people’s throats. Nor is it to be equated with membership in a particular church. At least it is not this for me; I doubt whether it means that to you. Rather, it is, as someone has observed, “a way to be followed, a truth to be done, a life to be lived.” It is beholding in the Man from Nazareth what you and I and all people are expected to be; and it is taking up that life-vision and committing ourselves to it.
But step back a moment! Remember that, for the Christian, this process of commitment is more than a humanistic enterprise. It is not simply an act of self-assertion. Quite the contrary! It is God-derived, God-centered, and God-sustained. It involves us in seeing how Jesus’ life is linked. It involves us in discerning in the Galilean the Divine initiative at the heart of human existence. It involves us in having that kind of relationship with Jesus which opens us to the presence and empowerment of the love of God which he so uniquely and decisively disclosed. To use St. Paul’s terminology, it involves us in a special kind of experience – the experience of dying and rising in Christ as we are made over by the God of love into the image of Christ. Now at the level of our daily lives all this has wider implications. It means allowing the inexhaustible love whose source is God to meet us in the range, depth, and expression of our neighborly concern. It implies allowing this liberating love to work in our souls, to take us out of ourselves, and to confirm itself in our out-going care for anyone whom we meet in need of our human attention.
Edmund Steimle, Union Seminary’s retired professor of preaching, summed up the matter well. “A Christian,” ne noted, “is one who has accepted Jesus’ invitation to pilgrimage along the way of love, sensing that out of the mystery which enfolds us – the mystery we call God – and participating in the way of love as we have seen it in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, that pilgrimage will lead us to the truth and the life” we so desperately yearn for.
To the extent that we call ourselves Christians, our task – yours and mine – is to take hold of this vision of things; it is to grapple it to our hearts. As a church which declares itself to be Christian, this means making this faith stance the centerpiece of our worship, our religious education, our social action. As Unitarian Universalists, it means placing things in their proper perspective. It means putting our Christianity first and viewing our Unitarian Universalism as a particular but corrective beacon of understanding along the road Christians must travel. As Christian pilgrims, it means binding ourselves to others who own the name Christian but whose interpretation is different and, through dialogue and cooperative effort with them, enlarging each other’s appreciation of what it means to be a loyal and responsible disciple of the Man from Nazareth. To paraphrase the words of Albert Schweitzer, our task is to learn of our own experience who Jesus is for our time. It is to let him reveal himself and his message of love to God and to humanity in “the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings” we are called to pass through. But far more than that, it is actually to follow him. It is to let him – his God-filled mind and heart – to take up residency and reign in our souls. It is to let the power of his life to become a new creation within us, transfiguring us into the men and women we are intended to be.
Is there any nobler faith worth holding out for? Is there any fuller life worth having?
Prayer – O God of light and hope made new, we thank you for your great gift of Christ Jesus, that we who walk in darkness may be guided by the light of life. Prepare now our minds and hearts that he will reign supreme in our thoughts and affections as Lord of Love and Prince of Peace. Overcome our pride and self-serving desires, and make him the lamp for our shaky feet, the beacon for our shadowed path. So may we, illumined and inspired by his life-bestowing presence, become stewards of his abiding truth and servants of his grace-filled way. Grant this to each and everyone of us, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.