Essays

Christianity, the most widely distributed of the world religions, having substantial representation in all the populated continents of the globe. In the late 1990s, its total membership exceeded 1.9 billion people.

Like any system of belief and values—be it Platonism/ Marxism, Freudianism or democracy—Christianity is in many ways comprehensible only 'from the inside', to those who share the beliefs and strive to live by the values and a description that would ignore these 'inside' aspects of it would not be historically faithful. To a degree that those o;-; the inside often fail to recognize, however, such a system of beliefs and values can also be described in a way that makes sense as well to an interested observer who does not or even cannot, share their outlook.

A community, a way of life, a system of belief, a liturgical observance, a tradition—Christianity is all of these and more. Each of these aspects of Christianity has affinities with other faiths, but each also bears unmistakable marks of its Christian origins. Thus, it is helpful, in fact unavoidable, to examine Christian ideas and institutions comparatively, by relating them to those of other religions, but equally important to look for those features that are uniquely Christian.

Any phenomenon as complex and as vital as Christianity is easier to describe historically than to define logically, but such a description does yield some insights into its continuing elements and essential characteristics. One such clement is the centrality of the person of Jesus Christ. That centrality is, in one way or another, a feature of all the historical varieties of Christian belief and practice. Christians have not agreed in their understanding and definition of what makes Christ distinctive or unique. Certainly they would all affirm that His life and example should be followed and that His teachings about love and fellowship should be the basis of human relations.

Large parts of his teachings have their counterparts in the sayings of the rabbis—that is, after all, what he was— or in the wisdom of Socrates and Confucius. Ill Christian teaching, Jesus cannot be less than the supreme preacher and exemplar of the moral life, but for most Christians that, by itself, does not do full justice to the significance of his life and work.

What is known of Jesus, historically, is told in the Gospels of the New Testament of the Bible. Other portions of the New Testament summarize the beliefs of the early Christian church. Paul and the other writers of Scripture believed that Jesus was the revealer not only of human life in its perfection but of divine reality itself. The ultimate mystery of the universe, called by many different names in various religions, was called 'Father' in the sayings of Jesus and Christians therefore call Jesus himself 'Son of God'. At the very least, there was in His language and life an intimacy with God and an immediacy of access to God, as well as the promise that, through all that Christ was and did His followers might share in the life of the Father in Heaven and might themselves become children of God. Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, to which early Christians referred when they spoke about Him as the one who had reconciled hurrianity to God; made the cross the chief focus of Christian faith and devotion and the principal symbol of the saving love of God the Rather.

This love is, in the New Testament and in subsequent Christian doctrine, the most decisive among the attributes of God. Christians teach that God is almighty in dominion over all that is in heaven and on earth, righteous in judgment over good and evil, beyond time and space and change, but above all they teach 'God is love'. The creation of the world out of nothing and the creation of the human race were expressions of that love and so was the coming of Christ. The classic statement of this trust in the love of God came in the words of Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount: "Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?" Early Christianity found in such words evidence both of the special standing men and women have as children of such a heavenly Father and of the even more special position occupied by Christ.

That special position led the first generations of believers to rank Him together with the Father—and eventually 'the Holy Spirit, whom the Father [sent] in [Christ's] name'—in the formula used for the administration of baptism and in the several creeds of the first centuries. After controversy and reflection that confession took the form of the doctrine of God as Trinity.

Baptism 'in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit' or sometimes perhaps more simply 'in the name of Christ', has been from the beginning the means of initiation into Christianity. At first it seems to have been administered chiefly to adults after they had professed their faith and promised to amend their lives, but this turned into a more inclusive practice with the baptism of infants. The other universally accepted ritual among Christians is the Eucharist or Lord's Supper, in which Christians share in bread and wine and, through them, express and acknowledge the reality of the presence of Christ as they commemorate him in the communion of believers with one another. In the form it acquired as it developed, the Eucharist became an elaborate ceremony of consecration and adoration, the texts of which have been set to music by numerous composers of masses. The Eucharist has also become one of the chief points of conflict among the various Christian churches, which disagree about the 'presence' of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine and about the effect of that presence upon those who receive.

Another fundamental component of Christian faith and practice is the Christian community itself—the church. Some scholars question the assumption that Jesus intended to found a church (the word church appears only twice in the Gospels), but His followers were always convinced that His promise to be with them 'always, to the close of the age' found its fulfillment in His 'mystical body on earth', the holy catholic (universal) church.

The relation of this holy Catholic Church to the various ecclesiastical organizations of worldwide Christendom is the source of major divisions among these organizations. Roman Catholicism has tended to equate its own institutional structure with the Catholic Church, as the common usage of the latter term suggests and some extreme Protestant groups have been ready to claim that they and they alone, represent the true visible church. Increasingly, however, Christians of all segments have begun to acknowledge that no one group has an exclusive right to call itself 'the' church and they have begun to work toward the reunion of all Christians.

Whatever its institutional form, the community of faith in the church is the primary setting for Christian worship. Christians of all traditions have placed a strong emphasis on private devotion and individual prayer, as Jesus taught. But he also prescribed a form of praying, universally known as the Lord's Prayer, the opening words of which stress the communal nature of worship: 'Our Father, who art in heaven'. Since New Testament times, the stated day for the communal worship of Christians has been the 'first day of the week', Sunday, in commemoration of the resurrection of Christ.

Like the Jewish Sabbath, Sunday is traditionally a day of rest. It is also the time when believers gather to hear the reading and preaching of the word of God in the Bible, to participate in the sacraments and to pray, praise and give thanks. The needs of corporate worship have been responsible for the composition of thousands of hymns, chorales and chants, as well as instrumental music, especially for the organ. Since the 4th century, Christian communities have also been constructing special buildings for their worship/ thereby helping' to shape the history, of architecture

The instruction and exhortation of Christian preaching and teaching concern all the themes of doctrine and morals: the love of God and the love of neighbour, the two chief commandments in the ethical message of Jesus. Application of these commandments to the concrete situations of human life, both personal and social, does not produce a uniformity of moral or political behaviour. Many Christians, for example, regard all drinking of alcoholic beverages as sinful, whereas others do not.

Christians can be found on both the far left and the far right of many contemporary questions, as well as in the middle. Still it is possible to speak of a Christian way of life, one that is informed by the call to discipleship and service. The inherent worth of every person as one who has been created in the image of God, the sanctity of human life and thus of marriage and the family, the imperative to strive for justice even in a fallen world—all of these are dynamic moral commitments that Christians would accept, however much their own conduct may fall short of these norms. It is evident already from the pages of the New Testament that the task of working out the implications of the ethic of love under the conditions of existence has always been difficult and that there has, in fact, never been a 'golden age' in which it was otherwise.

Almost all the information about Jesus himself and about early Christianity comes from those who claimed to be his followers. Because they wrote to persuade believers rather than to satisfy historical curiosity, this information often raises more questions than it answers and no one has ever succeeded in harmonizing all of it into a coherent and completely satisfying chronological account. Because of the nature of these sources, it is impossible, except in a highly tentative way, to distinguish between the original teachings of Jesus and the developing teachings about Jesus in early Christian communities.

What is known is that the person and message of Jesus of Nazareth early attracted a following of those who believed him to be a new prophet. Their recollections of his words and deeds, transmitted to posterity through those who eventually composed the Gospels, recall Jesus' days on earth in the light of experiences identified by early Christians with the miracle of his resurrection from the dead on the first Easter. They concluded that what he had shown himself to be by the resurrection, he must have been already when he walked among the inhabitants of Palestine—and, indeed, must have been even before he was born of Mary, in the very being of God from eternity, they drew upon the language of their Scriptures (the Hebrew Bible, which Christians came to call the Old Testament) to give an account of the reality, 'ever ancient, ever new' that they had learned to know as the apostles of Jesus Christ. Believing that it had been his will and command that they should band together in a new community, as the saving remnant of the people of Israel, these Jewish Christians became the first church, in Jerusalem. There it was that they believed themselves to be receiving his promised gift of the Holy Spirit and of a new power.

Jerusalem was the centre of the Christian movement, at least until its destruction by Roman armies in ad 70, but from this centre Christianity radiated to other cities and towns in Palestine and beyond. At first, its appeal was largely, although not completely, confined to the adherents of Judaism, to whom it presented itself as 'new', not in the sense of novel and brand- new, but in the sense of continuing and fulfilling what God had promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Already in its very beginnings, therefore, Christianity manifested a dual relation to the Jewish faith, a relation of continuity and yet of fulfillment, of antithesis and yet of affirmation.

The forced conversions of Jews in the middle Ages and the history of anti-Semitism (despite official condemnations of both by church leaders) are evidence that the antithesis could easily overshadow the affirmation. The fateful loss of continuity with Judaism has, however, never been total. Above all, the presence of so many elements of Judaism in the Christian Bible has acted to remind Christians that he whom they worshiped as their Lord was himself a Jew and that the New Testament did not stand on its own but was appended to the Old.