What do Christians Believe?

What do Christians believe? It is a question that, as a Christian, I'm fascinated by. This blog post started out as a session for a small group, but hopefully is of interest regardless.

“Hostile to the church, friendly to Jesus Christ. These words describe large numbers of people, especially the young today”

This is something I'm passionate about engaging with.

I wonder if you’ve ever wondered what a Christian is. 

Or what a Christian believes. 

The wise mystic thinker and speaker known as Homer Simpson, says that a Christian is someone who follows a religion: 

“you know, the one with all the well-meaning rules that don’t working in real life… uh, Christianity” 

Looking to the library, the Oxford English Dictionary defines a Christian as someone that: “is a believer in Christianity”, which isn’t that helpful, but does then go on to define Christianity as “the religion based on the person and teachings of Christ”. That kind of leaves us none the wiser, though, if we haven’t got a clue what those famous ‘teachings’ are.

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. 

I’m sure you’ve heard a range of definitions of what it means to be a Christian. The media offers many. We’ve gone through a few today - including Homer Simpson and the OED - and I want to suggest a key way of understanding what a Christian is.

Followers of Jesus. 

Being a Christian is about believing some stuff - but it is also about living in the light of that. We believe in Jesus, and as such we love and follow him. The wonderfully wise, occasionally controversial, and perpetually single (possibly because he was a birdwatcher) John Stott once wrote “Christianity is not just about what we believe; it’s also about how we behave”. This isn’t a call to a legalistic religion. This isn’t even a call, maybe at an altar or a school assembly ‘to embrace Jesus’. True Christianity, focused on Jesus and received as he intended it, without abuse or danger, but instead all of love, is something else. Following Jesus is about recognising the embrace of something, or someone, even bigger.

Who is this bigger person? It is not that controversial to say that the point of the Christian faith is a person. 

Jesus. 

Jesus of Nazareth. 

Jesus the Son of God. 

Jesus the second person of the Trinity.

Christians have come up with a few key ideas about Jesus. We call this ‘orthodoxy’, that is, ‘right belief’, and it is actually surprisingly straightforward. Basically, we believe that Jesus, who really existed around 2000 years ago as a man walking around, is both God and Man. We believe that he is the Promised King of Israel, and all creation, and also the one who sets his people free. We believe that back then, and today by the Holy Spirit (more on the Spirit later in the year, I think!), God did amazing miracles by the power and love of Jesus, like the famous feeding of the five thousand, turning water into wine, and the less famous but equally important turning over the tables of the money lenders in the temple courts. John 1:17 tells us that he was full of Grace and Truth. John 10:10, a verse that was vital to my early faith and continues to shape my life, tells us that Jesus came to enable and free us to live life, and have it to the full. This is the Jesus I believe in, and I’d invite you to consider believing in him. This Jesus, I believe and continually know, is worth following, exploring, loving.

Christians are people who believe in Jesus, and who have chosen to follow, explore and love this Jesus. Christians are people who believe, and be that believing are saved by, what Jesus did on the Cross. The Cross is the radical, awkward, bloody, substituting, justice-focused, forgiveness-paying, fundamental heart of the Christian Gospel. Without the Cross there is no Christianity. The Cross deals with the problem of sin - what a writer called Francis Spufford called the ‘HPtFtU’, or, in full, the ‘Human Propensity to F***things Up’. What the Cross does is pay the price of sin. Sin is doing things wrong - and, as we’ve probably all known via school or the criminal justice system, wrong things need to be made right. That is what the Cross does. In the person of Jesus, God sacrifices himself in order to set us free from sin, and give us the opportunity to explore real, full life with him.

The Cross isn’t just a one-time thing though. We don’t hinge, as Christians, on that slightly weird bank holiday called Good Friday. We aren’t psychopaths, or cosmic child abusers, enjoying a bloody death. Because you see behind a pre-medieval torture instrument, behind an execution, a bigger story of love and life was being written. The truth of ‘Christianity’ is the truth of Easter - that God didn’t just act to end the life of Jesus on Good Friday, but that Jesus rose from death as Glorious King of Everything on Easter Sunday. And that is why I’m not a Christian just so I can dodge Hell and get to heaven, but because God has promised that life on earth is a run up to the main event of eternity. Not second best, not even a preparation, but an integral part of eternity. Or, as a paraphrase of John’s Gospel might have it: eternal life, with Jesus, starts now. 

You don’t have to die to live forever.

So, in closing, Christians are those embraced by the Grace of God. When I look at you, and say that God loves you, I don’t mean some non-sectarian, politically correct good vibes. I mean that around 2000 years ago a Jewish man died and bled and was tortured for you. And that because of that, God won’t let you go, because of what he’s done for you and because of the plans he has for you. There is a beautiful verse in John 10, verse 29, where Jesus says of those who follow him; 

“My Father, who has given them (you) to me, is greater than everything, and no-one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand”. 

That is a powerful promise. But as well as being for you, it is not about you. 

Jesus is not about you, but he is for you. 

The Bible is not about you, but it is for you. 

God is for you. 

Or, as C. S. Lewis put it, “he’s not tame, but he is good”. That is because God is good, and he loves us, and he has a future without end in mind for us. That is at the heart of what Christians believe.

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