This piece ran as a letter to the editor on the Religion Dispatches site.

My friend Dr. Gary Laderman led us into the Triduum by asking “What do ‘The Christians’ Believe?”  His thoughtful essay led to the inescapable conclusion that one cannot define a common “Christian” view on any controversial social, ethical, political, or moral topic.  Whatever the issue – slavery, polygamy, homosexuality, abortion, feminism, pacifism, genocide, ethnocentrism, kosher food laws, Sabbath observance – there is no definitive Christian position on any of them.  Our Scriptures were written and edited by too many people.  Our tradition spans too many cultural sea changes.  Our constituency is simply too broad.

That is a hell of a point to make right before Maundy Thursday.  If being a Christian is not, inherently, about believing the things that the media and televangelists claim we believe, then what is it about?  Why do we bother?  What does a Christian believe?

Some might argue that we should return to the good old days, when Christians were untroubled by the moral relativism of postmodern ideas and pluralistic friendships.  Unfortunately, even if we were to turn the clock all the way back to first-century Jerusalem we find, as Acts 15 reminds us, that even the Apostles who knew Jesus personally were divided on how Christians should behave.  This diversity of opinion continued into the fourth century, when the leaders of the Church gathered together to clarify what Christians actually believed.

Those meetings ultimately produced three documents that remain the only consensus writings on Christian identity.  Two of them – the Apostles’ Creed, and the Nicene Creed – provided the theological logic that guided the selection of the writings for the third:  the Bible.  It is worth noting that, in a time of profound Christian diversity, leaders from Christian communities from around the known world did not include a single social, ethical, or moral issue in either creed.  In addition, they were comfortable including in the canon of Scripture writings that offered a wide variety of ethical perspectives.  When the early Christians got together and described the consensus of their beliefs, they did not talk about social issues.

So what, then, does it mean to be a Christian?  In the hopes of standing in the tradition of the early Church, and limiting myself to where there is actual Christian consensus, my own answer follows the logic of the Apostle’s Creed…

“I believe in God…”

Christians are people who believe in a divine reality, one beyond the material world perceived by our five senses.  We believe that there is more to life than what we can control or understand.  We believe that there is something beyond our comprehension, and that “something” is conscious, vital, wise, and loving in a way that is not limited by space or time.  While Christians might have different perspectives on the value of the experiences and content of the material world, we are united in our belief that there is more.

“I believe in Jesus Christ…”

As Christians, we do not simply believe in a distant and untouchable divine presence.  We also believe in “incarnation.”  We believe that in some inexplicable way almighty and perfect God took on human form and stepped into all of the messiness of human experience.  As Jesus, God healed us, taught us, comforted us, and fed us.  To be a Christian is to believe, not only in the unique incarnation of Jesus – but also to have faith in the possibility of incarnation itself.  Christians believe, even when all appearances are to the contrary, that God is present with us.  We believe that, no matter how different the divine reality is from the world in which we live, God is able to reach into our lives and touch us.

“…[Jesus] was crucified, died, and was buried…”

For Christians, believing in the incarnation means also confronting the reality of the cross.  God in human form, despite power and wisdom beyond our comprehension, did not wipe out disease.  God did not overthrow oppressive empires.  God did not create a new, Christian empire (although many lesser leaders attempted to make that claim).  Having lived among us and walked beside us, God surrendered to the forces of greed, selfishness, and power.  God was tortured by them, and eventually God died at their hand.

Surprisingly, Christians do not have a consensus as to why.  By privileging certain biblical passages over others, Christians have offered a variety of explanations:  Jesus was a ransom, Jesus was a sacrifice, Jesus was an example, and Jesus’ death reconnected creation to the Creator – just to name a few.  No single explanation is normative or even completely satisfactory.  Where Christians agree, however, is in the inevitability of Jesus’ murder.  For whatever reason, the incarnation of almighty God leads inexorably to God’s death – at the combined hands of a self-serving empire, a cruel bureaucracy, and an ignorant crowd.

This gives Christians a rather odd perspective on suffering, grief, loss, and failure.  If God, who created the world in the first place, can experience these things – then they are not the ultimate defeat they can sometimes appear to be.  If the collision of what is true, good and perfect with what is venal, debased and selfish can lead to a painful defeat even for Jesus, then when we experience those same things in our own lives we are not truly defeated. Christians believe that sometimes, perhaps often, choosing what is truly good and noble means utter failure in the eyes of a world which limits itself to honoring the shallow gain of material wealth.

“On the third day he rose again…”

Ultimately, those apparent failures are vindicated.  Christians believe that death itself, the fear of which looms over nearly all human endeavors, is neither an ending nor a defeat.  In the days of the early Church the first “witnesses” to Christianity were those who staked their lives on that claim, and as a consequence the Greek word for witness (/martyr/) became synonymous with choosing death over infidelity.  At the close of the Easter Vigil, Christians around the world will share in their hope by standing before the mystery of an empty tomb and we will feast together, trusting that Jesus’ encounter with death means that someday all graves will be empty.  Christians believe that death is itself defeated.

“and [Jesus] will come again to judge…”

Christians believe that the choices we make, our actions and our omissions, matter.  As Dr. Laderman has rightly pointed out, we do not agree on which choices we should make or how we should act.  We are united, however, in our common effort to work to make choices whose long-term consequences lead us closer to the person and example of Jesus.  Young seminary students are often discouraged to learn, on studying the Scriptures and Church history more closely, how little clarity there is on the specifics of what we should and should not do.  It is impossible for Christians to be defined by being completely correct about what is right and what is wrong.  Instead, we are defined by our desire to try.

“I believe…in the communion of saints…”

Christians believe that we make those efforts as part of a community.  We are accountable to each other, and to the long history of those who have gone before – from Moses to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Christianity is not a faith of or for individuals.  It is a single body formed by the concerted efforts those who (guided by God as the Holy Spirit) seek meaning in the teaching, life, and death of Jesus.  To be “Christian” is to trust that humanity is greater than the sum of our individual abilities and limitations.  Christians value and nurture community.

“Amen.”

This leaves a lot of things out, and those seeking clear guidance as to what “Christians” believe on controversial issues are likely to be disappointed.  Those who make a living off of claiming Christian consensus where there is none are likely to be livid (if they even bothered to read all the way through).  On the other hand, those who fear that – because their own views have differed from the popular Christian stereotype – they are not “real” Christians, they should take hope!

Perhaps more importantly, those from other traditions and those who claim no tradition at all, should likewise be encouraged.  There is much common ground here.  Although this specific combination of beliefs is uniquely Christian, there are many areas of commonality with widely-held views.  Most of us believe that there is more to life than what we can see and touch.  Most of us believe that what we do matters, and that fighting against evil systems and greedy desires is worthwhile even when we pay a price.  Most of us, when push comes to shove, harbor at least a suspicion that death is not final.  Through this lens, Christianity looks familiar to all who have asked these kinds of questions.

Which allows us to return to Dr. Laderman’s question original query. “What do Christians really Believe?” If we limit ourselves to widely-held stereotypes, the answer seems filled with cognitive dissonance.  On the other hand, if we allow his response to help us brush away all the detritus of easy caricatures and selfish political agendas, we can then answer honestly.  When we do, we can preserve a voice that is uniquely Christian, and we can allow that voice to speak in a way that is neither shrill nor strident.  Instead, the Christian voice becomes one that can sing in harmony with the rest of us, the rest of humanity, as we all seek to find hope in the darkness of empty tombs.

The conservative, evangelical Christian community has an automatic response to nearly every widely popular artistic creation.  As soon as a new one hits bookstands (Harry Potter), televisions (“Glee”), or the movie theater (Twilight), the far right has to condemn it.  The most recent example is James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar.  The movie’s worldview is the subject of countless critiques on conservative websites, and a discussion of its theology even made the New York Times editorial page.

Many of these articles attack the religion of the indigenous people of the alien planet Pandora for its pantheism and planet-worship.  Other articles challenge the anti-imperialist themes of the movie and their implied critique of current U.S. foreign policy.  All of this manufactured outrage – which presumably serves primarily to tack a political agenda onto a new cultural phenomenon – misses the mark by a wide margin.

First, Christians have always been able to find theological depth in stories and traditions that are not explicitly Christian or Jewish.  The first creation myth in Genesis, for instance, is a polytheistic account of a world made by a host of heavenly deities who appoint a sun god to “rule the day” and a moon god to “rule the night.”  Later in Genesis an ancient story about wrestling with a river god becomes the story that provides the nation of Israel with its name.  Much later on, the author of Revelation use the myth of Apollo’s birth as an image for the birth of the Messiah.  Christians can and should find truth in the beliefs of other cultures.

And the Na’vi are an alien culture in every sense of the term.  There would be little point in Cameron spending fifteen years creating the ecology and culture of another planet only to impose Christianity on it.  The religious beliefs of the Na’vi are completely consistent with the realities of life on Pandora.  Immersing ourselves in that world means experiencing the otherness of its theology along with its biology.

Of course, the beliefs of the Na’vi are not completely foreign.  Although they are in part shaped by their unique ecosystem, they also reflect a somewhat idealized synthesis of the nature religions common to the indigenous peoples who have borne the brunt of Western imperialism over the past few centuries.  Part of the genius of Avatar is reframing the conflict of imperialism away from battles among different ethnic groups.  Instead, in Avatar, all of humanity bears the collective guilt of imposing its selfish whims on an entire planet.

Avatar makes the sins of commercialism and Western triumphalism into universal, human sins; and it does so after helping us to lose ourselves completely in the lives of the native people threatened by human avarice.  As trite as this message might be, the human propensity for recreating these mistakes would seem to warrant Cameron’s retelling of this familiar cautionary tale.  Even were that not true, the beauty and passion with which he tells the story alone would make the repetition worthwhile.

It is the seductiveness of that vision that is the real threat to which these conservative pundits are responding.  There is no moral ambiguity in Avatar, and the clear villains are those who claim a manifest destiny for humanity and human commerce.  This is a direct threat to a hierarchical understanding of creation which, in placing humans at the top of a divinely ordained pyramid, is often used to justify the exploitation of the environment for short-term gain.  Such a view is not inherent in Christianity, but it is an essential tenet for those who wish to subvert Christianity into the service of their ethnocentrism and their greed.

The artistry of Avatar is not a threat to Christian belief, but it is a threat to arrogant assumptions about our own exclusive claims to truth, power, and wealth.  Dig deeply enough and it becomes clear that it is in fact these desires which many people actually worship (after layering a veneer of Christianity over them).  Unlike our fragile, human egos, the God of all creation is not threatened when we explore all of the possible permutations of that creation.  Nor is God minimized when we seek to understand those who honor that creation in different ways.

On this day Christians celebrate the triumph of compassion, love, and self-sacrifice over venality, ignorance, and death. For those of my tradition: “Χριστός ανέστη εκ νεκρών, θανάτω θάνατον πατήσας!” For those of other traditions, I wish you joy as well in those things that give life meaning. Whatever awaits us beyond the grave, we will surely all share in it together.

“I thought the cinematography was breathtaking, but the story was weak and derivative.”  That seems to be the consensus critique of James Cameron’s Avatar.  I think this critique misses two key points about storytelling.  One:  movies are not novels.  Two:  great storytelling is not necessarily about having an original plot.

For the record, I’m a word guy.  I love novels, and will often read a couple in any given week.  I also love movies and television shows that replicate the sophisticated wordplay of good novels.  Atticus Finch’s closing argument, Lorelei Gilmore’s run-on pop culture references, Will Hunting’s dressing down of a pretentious grad student, Malcolm Reynolds’ pithy observations about life on the lam, Hynkels closing monologue in The Great Dictator – I can think of countless moments on large and small screens that have rivaled the awe I have experienced and the brilliant craftsmanship of a thought-provoking novelist.

Words, however, are not the only way for a moviemaker to tell a story.  The clever minds at Monty Python built a creative empire by creating visuals whose humor actually undermined the words of the narrator.  In his “Man with no Name” trilogy, Sergio Leone allowed the landscape and the wrinkles at the corner of Clint Eastwood’s eyes to carry forward the story.  Michael Winterbottom’s controversial 9 Songs told the story of a relationship almost entirely through the two characters’ body language and sex life.

Music, landscape, movement, expression are all part of the filmmaker’s palette.  In Avatar, James Cameron has chosen to tell a story by creating a fully-immersive, coherent world.  For fans of science fiction, that alone is a huge gift.  Unlike books in the genre, science fiction movies only use as much pseudo-science as is necessary to tell their traditional stories in non-traditional settings.

The most successful science fiction movies make this clear.  George Lucas recreated World War II in space, even though dogfighting makes no sense in zero-gravity.  Gene Rodenberry wanted us to focus more on ethnic, class, and religious conflicts than on the fact that a “universal translator” is an impossibility.  The Wachowski brothers could not have asked their questions about identity and reality if they had allowed physicists to ask basic questions about the efficiency of using human beings as batteries.

In other words, if we look too closely at the world in which a typical science fiction movie is set, the story actually gets derailed.  In Avatar, the world is the story.  The ecology of Pandora is supposed to be completely real and breathtakingly alien.  Its humanoid and non-humanoid characters are familiar enough that we can predict their behavior, yet foreign enough that we can watch them in wonder.  Along with Jake Sully, we fall in love with Pandora – and along with him we feel it viscerally when greed and ignorance wound her.

The dialogue is secondary.  Even the specifics of the plot are secondary, most especially when they are obviously silly (unobtanium?  really?) or contrived (the only place you can get the rare ore is where the Na’vi live?  really?).  The story of Avatar is Pandora, and the way in which it swiftly and completely becomes our world too.

The plot that draws us into that world is hardly original, especially since it is a true story that residents of the Amazon would gladly tell us they are living out every day.  This is not the unpardonable sin some of Avatar’s detractors would have us believe it to be.  Some brilliant stories are completely derivative.  The story of star-crossed lovers preceded Romeo and Juliet by hundreds of years.  Surely Homer would recognize the plot of Oh Brother!.

Some stories are worth telling in new ways, so that new generations can hear them in their own language.  We can never be reminded too often that there are people and places with truths we might not understand.  We must constantly re-teach ourselves that power and selfishness can blind us to the destruction we wreak in our arrogance and greed

Quibble all you like about gravity inconsistencies and weak dialogue, James Cameron has crafted perhaps the most internally-consistent, immersive, extra-terrestrial world ever brought to life on the large screen.  In so doing, he has made the atrocities of ethnocentric consumerism real in a way that a cleverly contrived plot alone would not have.  For threats of mass destruction or genocide to be real to us, they must threaten our home.  This is why the apocalyptic scenes of Terminator are so much more terrifying than the destruction of Alderaan in A New Hope.

Avatar tells us how an alien land can become our home, and it does so by making Pandora our world, causing us to feel her wounds, and cheer at her defense.  James Cameron did not accomplish this with brilliant writing or an innovative story, he did it by making even the tiniest details of Pandora as real and vibrant as possible.  It works, spectacularly.

Found at http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2007/11/07/tent-show-revivalism/

Here’s a press release from Americans United:

AU Press Release

It seems that it’s not enough for folks like this to dumb down the gospel and reduce the historic witness of the Church to a quiz show question about personal salvation. They also want to use public school resources to make their saccharine proselytizing as accessible to students as possible.

Any public school system that uses taxpayer money to expose children to this kind of blatant evangelism should be ashamed. Christians should be particularly concerned by this because no self-respecting mainline group would do likewise, which means the only version of Christianity these children will be exposed to is this kind of far-right, revivalist parody of the gospel.

Shameful.

Asesino alevoso, enemigo del pueblo, y digno del escarnio de todos los hombres es todo aquél que, con el pretexto de guiar a las generaciones futuras, les enseña un sistema aislado de doctrinas y les musita al oído, en lugar del mensaje dulce del amor, el evangelio bárbaro del odio.

-José Martí
(1853-1895)

Treacherous assassins, enemies of the people, and worthy of everyone’s ridicule are those who, under the pretext of guiding future generations, teach them an isolated system of doctrines and whisper in their ear (instead of the sweet message of love) the barbarous gospel of hate.

-José Martí
(1853-1895)

You can’t step into the same river twice.
- Heraclitus

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead. His eyes are closed.
-Albert Einstein

Posterity, you will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that ever I took half the pains to preserve it.
-John Adams

On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question — is it politic? Vanity asks the question — is it popular? Conscience asks the question — is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, not polite, not popular — but one must take it because it’s right.
- Speech by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
given at the National Cathedral, Washington D.C.
March 31, 1968.

America was a great force in the world, with immense prestige, long before we became a great military power. That power has come to us and we cannot renounce it, but neither can we afford to forget that the real constructive force in the world comes not from bombs, but from imaginative ideas, warm sympathies, and a generous spirit. These are qualities that cannot be manufactured by specialists in public relations. They are the natural qualities of a people pursuing decency and human dignity in its own undertaking without arrogance or hostility or delusions of superiority toward others; a people whose ideals for others are firmly rooted in the realities of the society we have built for ourselves.

Robert F. Kennedy,
Indiana University,
Bloomington, Indiana,
April 24, 1968

It doesn’t require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.
- Samuel Adams

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
- Margaret Mead

“Let them call me a rebel and I welcome it, I feel no concern from it; but I should suffer the misery of demons were I to make a whore of my soul.”
-Thomas Paine

“Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
-Albert Einstein (1875-1955)

“That action injured you and saved me. I will not forget it.”
- LCDR Data to CDR Riker – “The Measure of a Man”

My centre is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I shall attack.
- Marshall Ferdinand Foch (1851-1929)

There are 10 kinds of people, the ones that get binary and the ones that don’t.

“Bitterness is like drinking a cup of poison and then waiting for the other person to die.”
– Nelson Mandela

“The best portion of a good man’s life – his little nameless acts of kindness and love.”
– William Wordsworth

“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us “universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
– Albert Einstein

All that is gold does not glitter,
not all those who wander are lost;
the old that is strong does not wither,
deep roots are not reached by the frost.
- J. R. R. Tolkien

Christianity has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.
- G.K. Chesterton

“I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.” - Lloyd Dobler
Say Anything

“Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and not concerned about the city government that damns the soul, the economic conditions that corrupt the soul, the slum conditions, the social evils that cripple the soul, is a dry, dead, do-nothing religion in need of new blood.”
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.
-CS Lewis

“Our scientific powers have outrun our spiritual powers. We have guided missiles and misguided men.”
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.”
-Carl Sagan

Yes…..you go down a dark hallway alone and I’ll wait here in a dark room alone.”
-Daniel Jackson
The Tomb

The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

A Bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom Bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a Bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures?
-Cicero

But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
-Thomas Jefferson,
Notes on Virginia

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-George Bernard Shaw

What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.
-C.S. Lewis

If you can’t take a bloody nose, then maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It is wondrous…with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid.
-Q (Star Trek, Q Who?)

“Men stumble over the truth from time to time, but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.”
-Winston Churchill

” ‘Master, what’s this I hear? Who can they be, These people so distraught with grief?’ … And he replied: ‘The dismal company of wretched spirits thus finds their reward due Whose lives knew neither praise nor infamy; … Who against God rebelled not, nor to Him Were faithful, but to self alone were true.’ “
-Dante, The Inferno

“By living, no—more—by dying and being damned to hell doth a man become a theologian, not by knowing, reading, or speculation.”
-Martin Luther

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
-Martin Luther King Jr.
Strength to Love, 1963

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
- Blaise Pascal

I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.”
- Thomas Jefferson

They washed up the dishes and went to bed. In bed, they made love. Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new. When it was made, they lay in each others’s arms, holding love, asleep.
- Ursula K. LeGuinn
The Lathe of Heaven

Two videos mocking anti-GLBT bigotry, and one Weird Al Palindrome video:

And a bonus, because I like these guys:

Icon of the Resurrection

Enough friends have asked me how I can be pro-GLBT, pro-choice, and a sociast and still consider myself theologically “conservative” that I decided to answer in more detail here.

The first point that I should probably clear up is that being theologically conservative is not the same thing as being socially conservative. Despite what Focus on the Family and other fringe groups on the axis of intolerance want you to think, Christian views on social issues have changed from generation to generation – and they’ve changed dramatically from era to era. If Christianity is defined by a particular social agenda, then there have been almost no Christians since the third century.

Likewise, trying to use some form of convoluted logic to make the words of the Christian scriptures “inerrant” is not being a theological conservative. Clearly the people who wrote, compiled, and edited the Jewish and Christian scriptures didn’t think they were creating an inerrant collection of documents. They would have made them more homogeneous if they had. People who talk about biblical “inerrancy” are really just using a code word for their desire to subordinate Scripture to their social agenda; and they typically do so with people who don’t have the scholarly background to appreciate how ludicrous their claims really are (or to realize that the “inerrantists” aren’t conserving anything, they’re creating a new doctrine).

The reason that I began with the negatives, defining what “theologically conservative” is not, is that – for me – paring Christian identity down to the essentials was part of the process of defining my own role as a pastor. Through ordination, the Church entrusts to its clergy the custodianship of the Chruch’s identity; and so understanding what is “Christian” and what is not is part of a pastor’s role. Consequently, when I was ordained I realized it was important to try have a working definition of the word “Christian” if I was going to be able to do my job well.

If one takes this exercise seriously, it’s harder than it seems. On one side, there are the shrill voices of the fundamentalists. In order to place their counter-cultural assertions beyond critique, fundamentalists insist that even the most minute component of their doctrine, no matter how scant the biblical or historical support for it might be, is an essential part of being “Christian.”

On the other side are the real liberals. They claim the label Christian, while ignoring, denying, or contradicting nearly everything that Christians have historically believed – be it the deity of Christ or even the authority of God.

Both extremes have kept the label “Christian” because they have positive associations with it or because it gives greater credibility to their belief systems; but in neither case is the label helpful. “Being a ‘Christian’ means understanding the world exactly the way I do, even if I don’t realize that the way I understand the world is very different from how Christians have historically understood it!” is not a useful definition. Nor is, “Being a ‘Christian’ can really mean anything as long as you include the word ‘Jesus’ in there somewhere.”

But with so many groups offering so many different, and contradictory, understandings of what it means to be a Christian, where can one turn? For me, the logical answer was (and is): Scripture and History.

Scripture alone is not completely helpful in this regard. Even if one limits such a search to the New Testament, the authors there wrote from very different perspectives and with different, sometimes competing, agendas. One of the reasons for the great variation in modern definitions of Christianity is that, lacking an external locus of authority, people have picked and chosen what they liked from Scripture to define Christianity.

An example here is the debate over predestination versus free will. There are biblical passages that support both positions, but adherents to each camp will insist that their position is the correct, Christian view. They do this by privileging the texts which support their view, and subordinating the texts which disagree with them. As a result, they claim that they are simply “taking the Bible at face value” and “letting Scripture alone define their beliefs.” What they are really doing, however, is imposing their beliefs on Scripture.

A couple of useful things come out of this realization. The first is that lots of things that might be helpful to have in a consensus definition of Christianity (like, for instance, settling the question of predestination) can’t be included. That’s because the biblical record is too mixed. This is even true on really major questions like the mechanism of justification/salvation, and on key social issues like slavery. If one approaches Scripture honestly, allowing its authors to speak with their individual voices, it becomes clear that the basic definition of Christianity, its essential heart, must allow for a diversity of views on many theological points.

Also, the value of history becomes clear. “Christian” isn’t just defined by Scripture. It is defined by the people who died for the gospel in the first few centuries of the Church’s development. It is defined by the people who, 350 years after the time of Christ, selected, compiled, and edited the Scriptures that would become the Bible. It is defined, in short, by the historical identity of the Church.

In addition to the necessity of history in establishing some consensus on interpreting Scripture, a study of Christian history is essential since that is the history of the Bible. Scripture was not created ex nihilo. The same process of prayer, study, debate, and encounter with the world which produced the creeds and early doctrines of the Church is the process which produced the Christian Scriptures. The Bible did not come to be in a vacuum, and trying to interpret it outside the context which produced it is nonsensical.

And so, in my personal journey to find a working, consensus definition of Christianity, I turned to Scripture and history. Fortunately, at that point my work was really done. Christians had already worked out two beautiful, consensus statements of what it means to identify oneself as Christians: the Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed. Interestingly, neither statement makes any mention of social issues or addresses the kinds of minutiae that Christians use for division and dispute these days. There was already enough history of dispute over those kinds of things that the Church knew that any statement of faith which was based on them would exclude more Christians than would include them.

Instead, the creeds focus on the heart of Christianity: a specific understanding of metaphyscial reality. This includes the preeminence of God, the deity of Jesus, the reality of the Holy Spirit, the brokenness of humanity, the need for restoration to the divine reality of God, the importance of community, and the defeat of death through the suffering, execution, and physical resurrection of Jesus, God Incarnate.

It is not in its practical morality that Christianity defines itself. Lots of groups produce moral views that are nearly identical to those held by most Christians. Nor is it in its explanation of the inexplicable that Christianity defines itself. The creeds are noticeably lacking in the kind of theological specificity that modern logic craves. The holy is, by definition, “other” and undefinable.

The uniqueness of Christianity is found in its metaphysical claims, its assertions about the nature of the human condition and the reality of a holy Creator seeking a relationship with us. It is for that reality – made explicit in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus – that the martyrs gave their lives. It is that reality that Paul proclaimed on Mars Hill. It is that reality which, no matter how it is encumbered by our own agendas and weaknesses, changes lives to this day. To deny any part of those metaphysical claims is to create new set of metaphysical beliefs, essentially a new religion. If someone wishes to do so, far be it from me to stop them. Nevertheless, a new religion needs a new name. It is not “Christianity.”

To finally answer Colin’s question, I define myself as “theologically conservative” because I define the gospel – the good news of Christianity – in a way that is consistent with how Christians have historically defined it. No matter how trendy or convenient, I will not take away anything from the heart of that confession. There is a God, incarnate in Jesus, who died of necessity to restore relationship with a broken humanity, and in his resurrection is victory over death.

Nor will I add to that definition, as fundamentalists do with (ironically) their own kind of liberalism – assuming somehow that their specific, modern understanding of morality and social issues is the unique and most accurate understanding of Christianity. In so doing, they ignore both the consensus of history and the diversity of Scripture, treating both dishonestly or, at best, disingenuously.

I am theologically conservative because I believe that, to be a “Christian” means to neither add to nor subtract from the common beliefs of those who died to give the word its meaning.

Model of the Trinity