The Historical Complexities of Being Christian, What does it mean to be Christian?
Sometimes that is very complicated, at some points it has meant believing the right thing and getting our beliefs right.
For example, in 1054 we had the Great Schism that led to the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church each respective half of the church excommunicating the other. The theological question that led to this schism was does the holy spirit come from the father and the son which was the western position or only from the father which was the eastern position. From today’s perspective this seems like a silly discussion and we would ask how could you ever know about the internal relations within God.
In another example, we go to the 1600s and the reformed Church in the Netherlands which almost split over whether God would send a messiah before the fall because he knew the fall was coming or only after the fall when a messiah was necessary. Again here getting our beliefs right mattered.
Another example dividing Methodists and Lutherans, the question ‘is perfection possible in this life?’ Methodist said yes, Lutherans said no we are always sinful and always justified.
A further example that Marcus has not fact checked comes in the 1800s shortly after the civil war. A small town business man in the remote mountains of North Carolina went to one of the larger cities and there saw for the first time in his life he saw and ice making machine. He returned to his town and told everyone about this great new invention and within a month the Church had split into ice and no ice Baptist the theological question being does it disrupt the natural order set out by God to make ice out of season or not. If God wanted us to have ice throughout the summer God would have raised the freezing temperature of water.
All of these divides have come from an importance placed on believing the right thing, which has sometimes made being Christian very complex as if it was about getting our doctrines right but being Christian is actually very simple.
The Simplicity of Being Christian
Being Christian is about loving God and loving what God loves. Loving God is at the heart of the Jewish tradition and because Jesus speaks of it as the great commandment the heart of the Christian tradition as well. We are also to love what God loves which John 3:16 sets out ‘for God so loved the world.’ The world meaning all of creation. God doesn’t love the world as it is and Marcus uses the words of Robert Frost when he says “God has a lover’s quarrel with the world. God loves the world and wills it be a better world.”
Being Christian is about being the kind of person who can love God and love what God loves. We need transformation, the process of growing up does not incline us to deep love of God and love of what God loves. The growing up process inclines us to be concerned about our selves, this happens to all of us. The earliest name of the Christian movement was Followers of the Way, Christianity is about this path or way of transformation. Transformation requires practice in paying attention to our relationship with God. In some ways our relationship with God is like a human relationship, human relationships deepen and grow by paying attention to them. Worship being the most important collective practice, prayer being the most widely used individual practice, these practices are not done because God needs them but they are about our own transformation.
Being Christian is about being part of a community of transformation. It’s about living within the Christian tradition as a means to an end of transformation, this is a Church as a community of formation and re-formation, and all of us need this. Those of us in Western Culture grow up with values very different than what is most central to the Bible, those values were part of our first formation, our first socialization. Christian community is about re-socialization so that our sense of self, our identity is shaped by Christian community.
Despite what many people think Christianity isn’t very much about believing, believing has very little trans-formative power. You can believe all the right things and still be mean. Being Christian is about passion, it’s about our passion for God and God’s passion for the world. God’s passion for the world is that the humanly constructed world be transformed into a world of justice and peace. Finally being Christian is about participating in God’s passion, this is what we are called to. Being Christian is about loving God and changing the world, it’s as simple and challenging as that.
Marcus closes with a prayer from St. Agustin from around the year 400. “Oh, God from whom to be turned is to fall, to whom to be turned is to rise, and in whom to stand is to abide forever. Grant us in all our duties your help, in all our perplexities your guidance, in all our dangers your protection, and in all our sorrows your peace. Through Jesus Christ our lord our body and our blood, our life and our nourishment. Amen.”