How to be a Christian

Every Christian I know has at some point wondered whether they were doing it right.

We wonder whether we are doing the right things, praying enough, giving enough, committed enough, sinning too frequently, going to church too infrequently, going to the right church or the wrong church with the right doctrine or wrong doctrine, whether we loved their neighbor too little, and on and on.

It's sad that so many of us live under that pained confusion, not ever really embracing joy, actually feeling quite burdened about all we believe, but it's not surprising. 

We're the first Christians to ever have lived in the 21st century. We can read all that we want about the people who came before us, but they didn't live in our context. Some things will be the same. Much won't be.

We're also the first Christians to have unlimited access to everyone else's thoughts, all the time. We're exposed to hundreds of voices declaring that they've finally figured out exactly what Jesus would think, all the time. We're reminded over and over that even when we think we're doing pretty good in our faith journey, someone thinks we've got the whole thing screwed up.

I had a conversation with a friend recently who mentioned that he was preaching through a particularly difficult Old Testament passage, and before preaching it he knew that he was going to have a handful of young fundamentalists who were going to tell him that he didn't preach enough about the law and God's holiness and how God should slay us all in our path. It's no wonder that we feel conflicted, like we're messing up. What if those young fundamentalists are right? What if our primary way of approaching God should be in fear, as if we're one wrong move away from getting the lightning bolt? One misstep away from his wrath?

That fear–the fear that God is just waiting to catch us screwing up–is not just the fear that keeps the religious-types devoted, but it's also the fear that keeps the wayward from coming close. For every believer who comes to church with a scowl because they are pretty sure that's what God wants from them–unadulterated, pure, religious dedication–is another believer who avoids it because they just feel like they don't measure up.

Both the Pharisee and the Tax Collector are invited into the family of God because of the Gospel.

This is why the Gospel is about freedom. The Pharisee needs to be freed from the massive burden of self-righteousness, and no little amount of self-doubt, that comes along with believing we have to earn our credibility before God. The tax collector needs to be freed from the burden of knowing that he can't measure up, or is somehow kept at an arms length from the true kingdom. The Gospel doesn't agree or disagree; it actually provides a whole new framework. It's no longer about you. It's about Jesus.

The more we can embrace that freeing thought, the more we'll simply be Christians. No heavy burdens. Just resting in what Jesus has done.

Speculating on Jesus: Reliable Sources?

The final challenge that might be presented in light of the recent survey previously referenced is the challenge of whether or not the source material of Jesus life is to be trusted. By way of reminder, the survey indicated that most Americans believe that Jesus was a historical person who existed, but the opinions about what he was actually like or who he actually was varied greatly. This means that for the modern American Christian, the chief concern is not proving that he was, but who he was. This means, first, that Jesus is someone that we should care about beyond the typical historical figure. Second, it means that we need to know where to look to find out more information about him. And then finally, we need to determine whether that source material can be trusted.

As I mentioned in the last post, this third question is only posed when we realize that the source material about Jesus (his biographies) unashamedly present a man who believed that he was God. His claims were not just universal in nature, but they were actually universal truth claims about himself. If he really was God, if he really did do the things that he said, then it has tremendous implications for our life today. So much so, that if we can't rightly ignore what he said according to his biographers, then the next best thing to do is question the source altogether. Perhaps the accounts have been embellished. Perhaps, over time, the accounts have been changed to present a figure that said more than Jesus ever actually did.

This argument is quite easy to dispel, of course. Simply, if you were trying to soften the blow of Jesus' claims, or you were trying to make him more acceptable to the skeptic, you would have dialed down his claims, not ratcheted them up. In this case, Jesus' biographers would have made his words more offensive, more outlandish, and ultimately more crazy–unless they were true and he actually said them. We must keep in mind that it is recorded, extra-biblical, and fully accepted history that this group of people called Christians were being mercilessly persecuted by Rome, and particularly by the emperor Nero. Even if we wanted to make the highly unlikely and somewhat illogical argument that all of these early Christians were delusional, persecution that led to death certainly would have cleared out the insane from the sane. Instead of shrinking this group of people, however, it actually grew.

It's helpful to remember that these were first and second generation Christians who were being killed. Some of them may have been alive during Jesus ministry; most almost certainly had parents who were alive during that time. They faced this persecution precisely because they believed that the message of Jesus was true. He really did say what he said he did. He really was who he said he was. 

The Gospel writers fall into this group of people who, again, were first or second generation Christians. Three out of four definitely saw the ministry of Jesus. One of them, Luke, may not have, and perhaps that is what prompted his thoroughly researched biography that he claims to present to a person named Theophilus. Nevertheless, it behooved all of them to account for Jesus life as it actually happened. There was no benefit to making the story more than it was. They were already going to lose their lives on account of Jesus and who he was. Better to die for the real Jesus than someone they made up. Furthermore, the early church consistently verified these accounts of Jesus life as being accurate and truthful accounts of Jesus life.

All things being equal, a group that believed a known lie–and make no mistake but that the central moment of Jesus life, the resurrection, would have been a known lie were it not actually true–may have continued to propagate that truth so long as it led to pleasurable results. That is, assuming that the first disciples made up the outlandish story of Jesus rising from the dead, so long as it had pleasurable results the group might have just gone on propagating that story. What did it matter, so long as the results were good? Yet this is not what happened. While it did, for a time, produce pleasurable results, the fact is that the more one believed the message, and the more that one shared the message and lived out the implications to this truth, the less desirable the results became. If you really believed it, and you shared it, and you were obvious about the message of Jesus resurrection, you were threatened, arrested, and beaten, almost from the jump. If the resurrection–again, the single act that motivated the early church to advance–were not true, the disciples would have known that it wasn't true. At some point, someone would have cracked. At some point, a second or third generation follower would hear the story, not having seen the resurrection for themselves, and said, "this is crazy", and eventually the movement would have died. Of course, the other possibility is that the resurrection is not a lie at all, but an actual historical event that took place. Quite frankly, this is the direction that all of the notable information points. The movement really did happen. Cowards became courageous. The government and the religious leaders–two major powers who wanted nothing more than for this Jesus character to go away–never presented the body, despite knowing exactly where they put it because they guarded it with soldiers.

In the end, we might find that the message of Jesus' biographies, and the claims that he made about himself, are either outlandish or they are old fashioned. We may find that they are offensive. But none of these are the central question that we ought to ask. The question is, are they true? Did Jesus actually say and do these things? Are the Gospel accounts trustworthy? Given the historical context (not to mention the harmony of the four accounts), it seems that it would be more reasonable to ask why we wouldn't trust them. No one had anything to gain by fabricating these stories. The government didn't want to advance the message. The religious leaders never wanted to think about Jesus again. The Christians knew they would be killed for writing the things that they wrote. The only reason you'd write them is if they were, at the end of the day, actually the things that Jesus said and did, and if, at the end of the day, you were willing to stake your life on their truth. And that's exactly what the writers did.

Speculating on Jesus: Where to look?

Given that the vast majority of American's already believe that Jesus was a historical figure, the challenge for the Christian person is to define who Jesus was, rather than that he was. The fact that he existed is assumed to be true, but this raises several difficult questions. The first question, "Why should I care?" is covered in this post. We must clarify for ourselves and for those around us why we should have any interest in researching who Jesus actually was; what is it that makes him stand out from all the other historical figures that we could study? This, of course, leads to the second question. If our interest in Jesus is piqued, where should we actually turn to find out more about him? That is the topic of this post.

For now, let's set aside the third question that I presented in the first post on the subject. That question, "how can I trust what I'm reading?", is so important to this second question that I debated whether or not it should come first. Upon reflection, however, I decided that it was better to set it aside for now and simply address what the material related to Jesus life actually says. As we approach Jesus to find out more about him, I think that we will find that our assumptions about him are that he is fairly innocuous; the image that we have is of a kind, caucasian gentleman with a lamb cast around his shoulders. Surely this Jesus cannot be much of a bother; this Jesus won't demand much from us. He is safe. As such, questions of whether or not we should put our confidence in what is actually recorded about Jesus won't really arise until after we've examined the material and found that, far from being innocuous, he is actually quite dangerous; far from demanding little, his claims are actually quite demanding. If not for us, at very least for the way in which we view the world. After coming into contact with who Jesus actually is and what Jesus actually teaches, we find that–if we are to trust him–we cannot go on the same way we have been prior to this moment. Everything changes if what is said about Jesus is true. And that is the point where most of us will be awoken to our senses and we will actually ask the question, "should I trust this material?" And when we ask it, then we will answer it. Until then, we'll just consider where we should look.

The place to begin, of course, is in the four account of Jesus life that are often referred to as "The Gospels". These four accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, each take a particular perspective in writing about Jesus, and each of them has a particular audience in mind. They were written by four different authors at four different time periods. Yet despite those differences, we find an amazing cohesiveness between the four books. If we begin with these accounts, there are at least two things that we will begin to see; to data points, if we can call them that, as we discover who Jesus actually is.

First, we'll discover what the very early followers of Jesus though about him. Two of the writers are Jesus disciples (Matthew & John), one of them is a close follower of Jesus who would later spend time with Peter (Mark), and the other is a historian who spent extensive time researching Jesus life and traveling with the Apostle Paul. Certainly, their perspective on who Jesus actually was ought to be important to us. They were the ones who saw him, walked with him, heard him, and ultimately believed in him. These four biographies of Jesus life give us all that we need to make a clear determination of what the early church thought about Jesus: namely, that he was Savior and Lord.

Second, we'll discover what Jesus thought about himself. Jesus was not shy about making radical claims about his identity, and his biographers do not soften these claims. This in itself is worth noting. If the early followers of Jesus knew that he made claims about himself that they did not believe were true, they would have taken great claims to scrub them from the record, as it were. Yet they didn't do that. This indicates that, not only did they believe Jesus, but it also gives us confidence that Jesus believed these claims about himself as well. The most outrageous claim, and the one that finally got him sent to his death (at least from the religious leaders perspective), was that he was God, the creator of the universe. Again, this is an outrageous claim that, were you or I to make it, would make us look like absolute fools. Indeed, Jesus would have looked like a fool too, had he not proved it with his death and resurrection–or at least, that's clearly what his early followers believed about him.

Once we have come into contact with what the early church thought about Jesus, and what Jesus believed about himself, we turn our attention to the next question: what did Jesus believe about the rest of the universe? Or, what did he believe about God? What was his belief about how the world operates, and why it was that he needed to come and offer some sort of salvation? We'll find in short order that what Jesus believed, and the "scripture" that he used, was the Hebrew Bible, or what Christians would refer to as the Old Testament. At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus opens to the center of that Scripture and claims that he is ushering in the fulfillment of all that it promises; at the end of his ministry, Jesus takes time to show that everything that was written in the Hebrew Bible pointed towards him. At very least, what we learn from this is that Jesus viewed the Old Testament as trustworthy. They were so trustworthy, in fact, that not only did God deliver them to his people so that they would know what it was that he expected of them, but then, in a great cosmic act of mercy, fulfilled the demands himself. This is the reason why Jesus can say to his followers that the only way to get back into God's good grace, as it were, was through Him. He was the gate into the life you've always wanted, that you've always tried to create. 

Finally, we come to the implications. What does this all mean? For that, we turn to what Christians refer to as the New Testament. A collection of letters and teaching that were written by the very early church leaders and distributed amongst the churches. They, too, were considered authoritative and trustworthy. In the letters we find the early church leaders instructing the people on how the fulfillment of God's law ought to impact our lives, today. One thing that stands out: the expectations of God still matter, it's just that our failure to live up to them isn't held against us. The good news of Jesus is that since he has fulfilled them, our failure to fulfill them will never be held against us again, so long as we put our confidence in his efforts rather than our own. It was unacceptable to the early leaders that you would want to have Jesus, but disagree with him about what he viewed as sin. You couldn't have it both ways. If you acknowledged that Jesus was God, Lord, and Savior, then you also had to agree that what Jesus believed about how God intended the world to be (evidenced through Jesus' scriptures and his own teachings) was actually true. You couldn't claim to follow Jesus, but reject what he taught, even if those teachings led to some discomfort in our lives.

This discovery is what causes most people to stop and question whether or not this source material can be trusted. After all, there are only two ways to make Jesus safer than he actually is. The first is to reinterpret what Jesus said so that it fits our pre-conceived agenda. This is the theological equivalent of having our cake and eating it too; we like the idea of Jesus, but we simply cannot accept what he taught about sin, sexuality, divorce, money, or anything else for that matter. I'll take the free gift of salvation, but functionally I'll reject the reason salvation was necessary in the first place. Surely, things cannot be that bad. The great danger of this softening, or "safening", of Jesus is that it's almost always an inside job. It comes from Christians who know that they cannot totally disparate the text, or the Bible as a whole quickly becomes untrustworthy. Better instead to reinterpret what Jesus said so that it is more palatable for the modern person. The trouble with this approach, however is that it requires us to assume that what was written about Jesus is supposed to be cryptic in nature and it's only we who have discovered the hidden code. Jesus wasn't quite as serious about sin as we make him out to be, see, we have finally discovered it. Of course, if we believe anything about the Bible, we know this is highly unlikely to be true, since it is God's word evealed to us, and a hidden or cryptic meaning would not be much of a revelation at all.

Finding that we cannot simply reinterpret Jesus claims so that they fit with what we wish he would have said, we move on to the second approach to making Jesus safe, and it is simply to question whether or not the text can be trusted at all. And this is the question I alluded to at the beginning of this post. This is when our sensibilities kick in: when we realize that what Jesus is actually calling us to is much more than simply believing he was a moral teacher or an all around good guy. Jesus claimed that he was God, that God required perfection, and that anything less than that resulted in death and eternal separation from God. "Death" is the equivalent of separation from ourselves; our souls are separated from our body. "Hell" is the equivalent of separation from God; our souls are separated from the life-giver. Yet Jesus also claimed that he was the solution to that separation. We could either try to fix the problem ourselves, or we could trust him to fix it on our behalf. Those are the two options that he presents. And if they are true, then it means that he is infinitely more important than perhaps we have previously assumed. But it can't be true, can it? Surely, his biographers must have gotten it wrong. Surely, these texts can't be trusted.

And that will be the next challenge that we will have to answer.