I suppose
the one thing that really defines a Christian is ‘someone whose world view is
centred on Jesus’.
Many would
like to define it more narrowly: a Christian believes that Jesus is the Son of
God; a Christian believes in the Holy Trinity; a Christian believes that Christ
died for our sins and physically rose from the dead; a Christian is someone who
has had a definite, describable experience of being born again; and so on.
But all
these things are controversial. There are Christians who believe in them,
Christians who don’t believe in them, and Christians who interpret them in such
an unorthodox way that it is hard to say whether they believe in them or not.
Probably the
only thing we can say with any confidence is that if you call yourself a ‘Christian’
at all it is because your faith and your view of the world are centred in the
person we know as Jesus Christ. There are of course people who have little
interest in religion and only call themselves Christians because they are not
Muslims or Hindus, but even they assume that their faith ought to be centred in Jesus.
But who is
Jesus? There are arguments as to whether we can know much, or even anything,
about him at all. The Gospels contradict each other, and scholars argue as to
how much of the material in them is eye-witness history and how much is legend,
how many of the sayings of Jesus were really said by him and how many were made
up by his followers. The ‘Jesus Seminar’ claims to have fairly accurate
knowledge, but many are not so sure. Some people even claim that the Christian
message was never meant to be taken literally, and Jesus of Nazareth never actually
existed at all.
Many people
worry about this. How can I follow Jesus if I don’t know what he actually said
and did? How can I preach the message of Jesus if I don’t know exactly what he
taught?
I find
myself getting more and more relaxed about questions like this. The Bible,
supplemented and modified by two thousand years of Christian tradition, tells
us a story. Many people down through the ages have been excited and inspired by
this story. Some have responded to some parts of it, others to other parts.
Many different pictures of Jesus have emerged. Whatever you say about Jesus,
someone will disagree, but no-one can actually prove that their picture of Jesus is the right one.
My picture
of Jesus is of one who had the courage to love unconditionally and to make love
the heart of everything. He saw through all the messy complexities and
hypocrisies of religion and stuck to the one central principle of love. This
made him a social and religious radical, and it was for this that he was
condemned by the authorities and executed.
Some
orthodox believers will say this is too simplistic, that there are essential
doctrines I must believe about Jesus. Some historians will say Jesus wasn’t
really quite how I imagine him. But this is the part of the story that excites
and inspires me, and it is a big enough challenge for me to live by. What if
this great idea of unconditional love as the meaning of everything is not what
Jesus of Nazareth actually preached? Well, if it inspires and moves me, does it
matter where it came from? And if it makes me a better human being (if only
slightly), what does it matter whether I am labelled a ‘Christian’ or not?
