Major religion, stemming from the life, teachings, and death of Jesus of
Nazareth (the Christ, or the Anointed One of God) in the 1st century ad.
It has become the largest of the world’s religions. Geographically the
most widely diffused of all faiths, it has a constituency of more than 2
billion believers. Its largest groups are the Roman Catholic Church, the
Eastern Orthodox churches, and the Protestant churches; in addition to
these churches there are several independent churches of Eastern
Christianity as well as numerous sects throughout the world. See also
Eastern Orthodoxy; Roman Catholicism; and Protestantism.
This article first considers the nature and development of the
Christian religion, its ideas, and its institutions. This is followed by
an examination of several intellectual manifestations of Christianity.
Finally, the position of Christianity in the world, the relations among
its divisions and denominations, its missionary outreach to other
peoples, and its relations with other world religions are discussed. For
supporting material on various topics, see biblical literature; doctrine
and dogma; Jesus Christ; sacred; worship; prayer; creed; sacrament;
religious dress; monasticism; and priesthood.
The church and its history » The essence and identity of Christianity
At the very least, Christianity is the faith tradition that focuses on
the figure of Jesus Christ. In this context, faith refers both to the
believers’ act of trust and to the content of their faith. As a
tradition, Christianity is more than a system of religious belief. It
also has generated a culture, a set of ideas and ways of life,
practices, and artifacts that have been handed down from generation to
generation since Jesus first became the object of faith. Christianity is
thus both a living tradition of faith and the culture that the faith
leaves behind. The agent of Christianity is the church, the community of
people who make up the body of believers.
To say that Christianity “focuses” on Jesus Christ is to say that
somehow it brings together its beliefs and practices and other
traditions in reference to a historic figure. Few Christians, however,
would be content to keep this reference merely historical. Although
their faith tradition is historical—i.e., they believe that transactions
with the divine do not occur in the realm of timeless ideas but among
ordinary humans through the ages—the vast majority of Christians focus
their faith in Jesus Christ as someone who is also a present reality.
They may include many other references in their tradition and thus may
speak of “God” and “human nature” or of “church” and “world,” but they
would not be called Christian if they did not bring their attentions
first and last to Jesus Christ.
While there is something simple about this focus on Jesus as the
central figure, there is also something very complicated. That
complexity is revealed by the thousands of separate churches, sects, and
denominations that make up the modern Christian tradition. To project
these separate bodies against the background of their development in the
nations of the world is to suggest the bewildering variety. To picture
people expressing their adherence to that tradition in their prayer life
and church-building, in their quiet worship or their strenuous efforts
to change the world, is to suggest even more of the variety.
Given such complexity, it is natural that throughout Christian
history both those in the tradition and those surrounding it have made
attempts at simplification. Two ways to do this have been to concentrate
on the “essence” of the faith, and thus on the ideas that are integral
to it, or to be concerned with the “identity” of the tradition, and thus
on the boundaries of its historical experience.
Modern scholars have located the focus of this faith tradition in the
context of monotheistic religions. Christianity addresses the historical
figure of Jesus Christ against the background of, and while seeking to
remain faithful to, the experience of one God. It has consistently
rejected polytheism and atheism.
A second element of the faith tradition of Christianity, with rare
exceptions, is a plan of salvation or redemption. That is to say, the
believers in the church picture themselves as in a plight from which
they need rescue. For whatever reason, they have been distanced from God
and need to be saved. Christianity is based on a particular experience
or scheme directed to the act of saving—that is, of bringing or “buying
back,” which is part of what redemption means, these creatures of God to
their source in God. The agent of that redemption is Jesus Christ.
It is possible that through the centuries the vast majority of
believers have not used the term essence to describe the central focus
of their faith. The term is itself of Greek origin and thus represents
only one part of the tradition, one element in the terms that have gone
into making up Christianity. Essence refers to those qualities that give
something its identity and are at the centre of what makes that thing
different from everything else. To Greek philosophers it meant something
intrinsic to and inherent in a thing or category of things, which gave
it its character and thus separated it from everything of different
character. Thus Jesus Christ belongs to the essential character of
Christianity and gives it identity in the same way that Buddha does for
Buddhism.
If most people are not concerned with defining the essence of
Christianity, in practice they must come to terms with what the word
essence implies. Whether they are engaged in being saved or redeemed on
the one hand, or thinking and speaking about that redemption, its agent,
and its meaning on the other, they are concentrating on the essence of
their experience. Those who have concentrated from within the faith
tradition have also helped to give it its identity. It is not possible
to speak of the essence of a historical tradition without referring to
how its ideal qualities have been discussed through the ages. Yet one
can take up the separate subjects of essence and identity in sequence,
being always aware of how they interrelate.
The church and its history » The essence and identity of Christianity »
Historical views of the essence » Early views
Jesus and the earliest members of the Christian faith tradition were
Jews, and thus they stood in the faith tradition inherited by Hebrew
people in Israel and the lands of the Diaspora. They were monotheists,
devoted to the God of Israel. When they claimed that Jesus was divine,
they had to do so in ways that would not challenge monotheism.
Insofar as they began to separate or be separated from Judaism, which
did not accept Jesus as the Messiah, the earliest Christians expressed
certain ideas about the one on whom their faith focused. As with other
religious people, they became involved in a search for truth. God, in
the very nature of things, was necessarily the final Truth. In a
reference preserved in the Gospel According to John, however, Jesus
refers to himself not only as “the way” and “the life” but also as “the
Truth.” Roughly, this meant “all the reality there is” and was a
reference to Jesus’ participation in the reality of the one God.
From the beginning there were Christians who may not have seen Jesus
as the Truth, or as a unique participant in the reality of God. There
have been “humanist” devotees of Jesus, modernist adapters of the truth
about the Christ; but even in the act of adapting him to humanist
concepts in their day they have contributed to the debate of the essence
of Christianity and brought it back to the issues of monotheism and a
way of salvation.
It has been suggested that the best way to preserve the essence of
Christianity is to look at the earliest documents—the four Gospels and
the letters that make up much of the New Testament—which contain the
best account of what the earliest Christians remembered, taught, or
believed about Jesus Christ. It is presumed that “the simple Jesus” and
the “primitive faith” emerge from these documents as the core of the
essence. This view has been challenged, however, by the view that the
writings that make up the New Testament themselves reflect Jewish and
Greek ways of thinking about Jesus and God. They are seen through the
experience of different personalities, such as the apostle Paul or the
nameless composers—traditionally identified as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and
John—of documents that came to be edited as the Gospels. Indeed, there
are not only diverse ways of worship, of polity or governance of the
Christian community, and of behaviour pictured or prescribed in the New
Testament but also diverse theologies, or interpretations of the heart
of the faith. Most believers see these diversities as complementing each
other and leave to scholars the argument that the primal documents may
compete with and even contradict each other. Yet there is a core of
ideas that all New Testament scholars and believers would agree are
central to ancient Christian beliefs. One British scholar, James G.
Dunn, for example, says they would all agree that “the Risen Jesus is
the Ascended Lord.” That is to say, there would have been no faith
tradition and no scriptures had not the early believers thought that
Jesus was “Risen,” raised from the dead, and, as “Ascended,” somehow
above the ordinary plane of mortal and temporal experience. From that
simple assertion early Christians could begin to complicate the search
for essence.
An immediate question was how to combine the essential focus on Jesus
with the essential monotheism. At various points in the New Testament
and especially in the works of the Apologists, late 1st- and 2nd-century
writers who sought to defend and explain the faith to members of
Greco-Roman society, Jesus is identified as the “preexistent Logos.”
That is, before there was a historical Jesus born of Mary and accessible
to the sight and touch of Jews and others in his own day, there was a
Logos—a principle of reason, an element of ordering, a “word”—that
participated in the Godhead and thus existed, but which only preexisted
as far as the “incarnate” Logos, the word that took on flesh and
humanity (John 1:1–14), was concerned.
In searching for an essence of truth and the way of salvation, some
primitive Jewish Christian groups, such as the Ebionites, and occasional
theologians in later ages employed a metaphor of adoption. These
theologians used as their source certain biblical passages (e.g., Acts
2:22). Much as an earthly parent might adopt a child, so the divine
parent, the one Jesus called abba (Aramaic: “daddy,” or “father”), had
adopted him and taken him into the heart of the nature of what it is to
be God. There were countless variations of themes such as the
preexistent Logos or the concept of adoption, but they provide some
sense of the ways the early Apologists carried out their task of
contributing to the definition of the essence of their Jesus-focused yet
monotheistic faith.
While it is easier to point to diversity than to simplicity or
clarity among those who early expressed faith, it must also be said that
from the beginning the believers insisted that they were—or were
intended to be, or were commanded and were striving to be—united in
their devotion to the essence of their faith tradition. There could not
have been many final truths, and there were not many legitimate ways of
salvation. It was of the essence of their tradition to reject other gods
and other ways, and most defining of essence and identity occurred as
one set of Christians was concerned lest others might deviate from the
essential faith and might, for example, be attracted to other gods or
other ways.
While Jesus lived among his disciples and those who ignored or
rejected him, to make him the focus of faith or denial presented one
type of issue. After the “Risen Jesus” had become the “Ascended Lord”
and was no longer a visible physical presence, those at the head of the
tradition had a different problem. Jesus remained, a present reality to
them, and when they gathered to worship they believed that he was “in
the midst of them.” He was present in their minds and hearts, in the
spoken word that testified to him, and also present in some form when
they had their sacred meal and ingested bread and wine as his “body and
blood.” They created a reality around this experience; if once Judaism
was that reality, now Christianity resulted.
The search for the essence of Christianity led people in the Greek
world to concentrate on ideas. The focus on Jesus narrowed to ideas, to
“beliefs about” and not only “belief in,” and to doctrines. The essence
began to be cognitive, referring to what was known, or substantive. As
debates over the cognitive or substantive aspects of Jesus’
participation in God became both intense and refined, the pursuit of
essences became almost a matter of competition in the minds of the
Apologists and the formulators of doctrines in the 3rd through the 6th
centuries. During this time Christians met in council to develop
statements of faith, confessions, and creeds. The claimed essence was
used in conflict and rivalry with others. Christian Apologists began to
speak, both to the Jews and to the other members of the Greco-Roman
world, in terms that unfavourably compared their religions to
Christianity. The essence also came to be a way to define who had the
best credentials and was most faithful. The claim that one had discerned
the essence of Christianity could be used to rule out the faithless, the
apostate, or the heretic. The believers in the essential truth and way
of salvation saw themselves as insiders and others as outsiders. This
concept became important after the Christian movement had triumphed in
the Roman Empire, which became officially Christian by the late 4th
century. To fail to grasp or to misconceive what was believed to be the
essence of faith might mean exile, harassment, or even death.
In the early stages of the development of their faith, Christians did
something rare if not unique in the history of religion: they adopted
the entire scriptural canon of what they now saw to be another faith,
Judaism, and embraced the Hebrew Scriptures, which they called the Old
Testament. But while doing so, they also incorporated the insistent
monotheism of Judaism as part of the essence of their truth and way of
salvation, just as they incorporated the Hebrew Scriptures’ story as
part of their own identity-giving narrative and experience.
This narrowing of focus on Jesus Christ as truth meant also a
complementary sharpening of focus on the way of salvation. There is no
purpose in saving someone who does not need salvation. Christianity
therefore began to make, through its councils and creeds, theologians
and scholars, some attempts at definitive descriptions of what it is to
be human. Later some of these descriptions were called “original sin,”
the idea that all humans inherited from Adam, the first-created human, a
condition that made it impossible for them to be perfect or to please a
personal God on their own. While Christians never agreed on a specific
teaching on original sin, they did describe as the essence of
Christianity the fact that something limited humans and led them to need
redemption. Yet the concentration always returned to Jesus Christ as
belonging more to the essence of Christianity than did any statements
about the human condition.
The essence of Christianity eventually included statements about the
reality to God. Christians inherited from the Jews a relatively intimate
picture of a God who made their young and small universe, with its
starry heavens, and then carried on discourse with humans, making
covenants with them and rewarding or punishing them. But the Greek part
of their tradition contributed the concept of a God who was greater than
any ideas of God but who had to be addressed through ideas. Indeed, it
was during this time that words such as essence, substance, and
being—terms that did not belong to the Old or New Testament
traditions—came to be wedded to biblical witness in the creeds.
Christians used the vocabulary and repertory of options then available
to them in speaking of the all-encompassing and the ineffable and
grafted these onto the witness to God that was essential to their faith.
Modern Christians, including many who reject the notion of creeds or any
non-biblical language, are still left with the problems and intentions
of the ancients: how to think of Jesus in such a way that they are
devoted to him not in isolation, as an end in himself—for that would be
idolatry of a human—but in the context of the total divine reality.
It is impossible to chronicle the efforts at expressing essence
without pointing to diversity within the unity. Yet the belief in final
unity belongs to any claims of finding an essence. Thus it was both a
typical and a decisive moment when in the 5th century Vincent of
Lérins’s, a Gallo-Roman theologian, provided a formula according to
which Christianity expressed a faith that “has been believed everywhere,
always, and by all” (quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum
est). Even if not all Christians could agree on all formulations, it was
widely held that there was some fundamental “thing” that had thus been
believed.
The church and its history » The essence and identity of Christianity
» Historical views of the essence » Medieval and Reformation views
For a thousand years, a period that began with what some historians
called “Dark Ages” in the Christian West and that endured through both
the Eastern and Western extensions of the Roman Empire, the essence of
Christian faith was guarded differently than it had been in the first
three centuries, before Christianity became official; throughout the
Middle Ages itself the understanding of the essence evolved. In the 4th
and 5th centuries, theologians including Ambrose, Augustine of Hippo,
and Jerome laid the foundations for the development of Christian
thought. By the 5th century, the bishop of Rome, the pope, as a result
of conciliar decisions and unique events in Rome, had become the leading
spokesman for the faith in Latin, or Western, Christendom. This position
would assume greater institutional strength in later periods of the
Middle Ages. In the Eastern churches, despite the claims of the
patriarch of Constantinople, no single pontiff ruled over the bishops,
but they saw themselves just as surely and energetically in command of
the doctrines that made up the essence of Christianity.
The Western drama, especially after the year 1000, was more fateful
for Christianity in the modern world. The pope and the bishops of Latin
Christendom progressively determined the essence through doctrines and
canons that enhanced the ancient grasp of faith. As they came to
dominate in Europe, they sought to suppress contrary understandings of
the essence of the faith. In the 14th and 15th centuries, Jews were
confined to ghettos, segregated and self-segregated enclaves where they
did not and could not share the full prerogatives of Christendom. When
sects were defined as heretical—Waldenses, Cathari, and others—because
of their repudiation of Roman Catholic concepts of Christian essence,
they had to go into hiding or were pushed into enclaves beyond the reach
of the custodians of official teaching. The essence of Christianity had
become a set of doctrines and laws articulated and controlled by a
hierarchy that saw those doctrines as a divine deposit of truth.
Theologians might argue about the articulations with great subtlety and
intensity, but in that millennium few would have chosen to engage in
basic disagreement over the official teachings, all of which were seen
to be corollaries of the basic faith in Jesus Christ as participating in
the truth of God and providing the way of salvation.
Through these centuries there was also increasing differentiation
between the official clergy, which administered the sacraments and
oversaw the body of the faithful, and the laity. Most of what was
debated centuries later about the essence of medieval Christianity came
from the records of these authorities. As more is learned about the
faith of the ordinary believers, it becomes more evident in the records
of social history that people offered countless variations on the
essence of the faith. Many people used the church’s officially
legitimated faith in the power of saints’ relics to develop patterns of
dealing with God that, according to the Protestant Reformers, detracted
from the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the only agent of salvation.
During this thousand years in both Western and Eastern Christianity,
when the faith had a cultural monopoly, there was an outburst of
creativity and a fashioning of a Christian culture that greatly enhanced
and complicated any once-simple notions of an essence. Christianity was
as much a cultural tradition as it was a faith tradition, an assertion
that the leadership of the medieval church would not have regarded as
diminishing or insulting. Christianity as a cultural tradition is
perhaps most vividly revealed in the magnificent cathedrals and churches
that were built in the Middle Ages and in the illuminated manuscripts of
the period.
As Christian culture grew ever more complex, however, there arose a
constant stream of individual reformers who tried to get back to what
they thought was its original essence. Among these was St. Francis of
Assisi, who in his personal style of devotion and simple way of life was
often seen as capturing in his person and teachings more of the original
essence of Jesus’ truth and way of salvation than did the ordained
authorities in the church and empires. Unlike the Waldenses and members
of other dissident groups, Francis accepted the authority of the
ordained clergy and contributed to a reform and revival of the broader
church.
In the late Middle Ages a number of dissenters emerged—such as Jan
Hus in Bohemia, John Wycliffe in England, and Girolamo Savonarola in
Florence—who challenged the teachings of the church in more radical ways
than someone like St. Francis did. For all their differences, they were
united in their critique of what they thought complicated the essence of
Christianity. On biblical prophetic grounds they sought simplicity in
the cognitive, moral, and devotional life of Christianity.
When the Protestant Reformation divided Western Christianity—as
Eastern Christians, already separated since the 11th century, looked
on—the 16th-century European world experienced a foretaste of the
infinite Christian variety to come. The reforms that gave rise to the
many Protestant bodies—Lutheran, Anglican, Presbyterian, Reformed,
Anabaptist, Quaker, and others—were themselves debates over the essence
of Christianity. Taken together, they made it increasingly difficult for
any one to claim a monopoly on the custodianship of that essence, try as
they might. Each new sect offered a partial discernment of a different
essence or way of speaking of it, even if the vast majority of
Protestants agreed that the essence could be retrieved best, or, indeed
uniquely, through recovery of the central message of the Holy
Scriptures.
After the ferment of the Reformation, most of the dissenting groups,
as they established themselves in various nations, found it necessary to
engage in their own narrowing of focus, rendering of precise doctrines,
and understanding of divine truth and the way of salvation. Within a
century theologians at many Protestant universities were adopting
systems that paralleled the old scholasticisms against which some
reformers had railed. Those who had once thought that definition of
doctrine failed to capture the essence of Christianity were now defining
their concept of the essence in doctrinal terms, but were doing so for
Lutherans, Reformed, Presbyterians, and even for more radical dissenters
and resistors of creeds, such as the Anabaptists.
The belief of Vincent of Lérins that there is a faith that has been
held by everyone, always, and everywhere, lived on through the
proliferation of Protestant denominations and Roman Catholic movements
and, in sophisticated ways, has helped animate the modern ecumenical
movement. Thus some have spoken of that movement as a reunion of
churches, an idea that carries an implication that they had once been
“one,” and a further hint that one included an essence on which people
agreed. Reunion, then, would mean a stripping away of accretions, a
reducing of the number of arguments, and a refocusing on essentials.
The church and its history » The essence and identity of Christianity
» Historical views of the essence » Modern views
The modern church and world brought new difficulties to the quest for
defining an essence of Christianity. Both as a result of Renaissance
humanism, which gloried in human achievement and encouraged human
autonomy, and of Reformation ideas that believers were responsible in
conscience and reason for their faith, an autonomy in expressing faith
developed. Some spoke of Protestantism as being devoted to the right of
private judgment. Roman Catholics warned that believers who did not
submit to church authority would issue as many concepts of essence as
there were believers to make the claims.
In the 18th century the Western philosophical movement called the
Enlightenment further obscured searches for the essence of Christianity.
The Enlightenment proclaimed optimistic views of human reach and
perfectibility that challenged formerly essential Christian views of
human limits. The deity became a benevolent if impersonal force, not an
agent that arranged a way of salvation to people in need of rescue. The
Enlightenment also urged a view of human autonomy and of the use of
reason in a search for truth. But, in the view of Enlightenment
thinkers, reason did not need to be responsive to supernatural
revelation, as contained in the Old and New Testaments. Indeed, reason
questioned the integrity of those scriptures themselves through methods
of historical and literary criticism. No longer should one rely on the
word of priests who passed on notions of essential Christianity.
While many Westerners moved out of the orbit of faith as a result of
the Enlightenment and the rise of criticism, many others—in Germany,
France, England, Scotland, and, eventually, the Americas—remained
Christians, people of faith if now of faith differently expressed. Some
Christians, the Unitarians, rejected the ideas of both a preexistent
Logos made incarnate in Christ and a Jesus adopted into godhead. Jesus
was seen as the great teacher or exemplar. They thus also tested the
boundaries of essential teaching about a way of salvation. And at the
heart of Deist Christianity was a view of God that remained “mono-” in
that it was devoted to a single principle, but as “deist” instead of
“theist” it departed from the ancient picture of a personal God engaged
in human affairs. These were blows to the integrity of Vincent of
Lérins’s concept and more reasons for the orthodox to use Vincent’s
concept to exclude Unitarians, Deists, and other innovators from the
circle of Christianity.
In the 19th century philosophical and historical criticism inspired
some Christians to renew the search for essences. For example, in the
wake of the German Idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, Hegelian scholars
tried to rescue Christianity by viewing it as an unfolding of “absolute
spirit.” They followed Christian history through a constant dialectic, a
series of forces and counterforces producing new syntheses. A problem
with the Hegelian approach arose as the historical Jesus came to be seen
merely as one stage in the unfolding of absolute spirit; he was not a
decisive agent of the way of salvation “once for all,” as the biblical
Letter to the Hebrews had claimed him to be. Soon biblical scholars such
as David Friedrich Strauss were speaking of the historical Jesus as a
myth of a certain set of people in one moment of the dialectical
unfolding. The Christian faith itself began to dissolve, and many
Hegelians began to reject the God of the Christian faith along with the
historical Jesus.
Another group of 19th-century theologians took the opposite course.
In the spirit of the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant,
these neo-Kantians spoke not of the noumenal world, the unseen realm of
essences beyond visible reality, but of the phenomenal realm, the world
of history in which things happened. Theologians in this school engaged
in a century-long “quest for the historical Jesus,” in which they sought
the simple essence of Christianity. Significantly, the greatest exemplar
of this historical tradition, the German theologian Adolf von Harnack,
wrote one of the best-known modern books on the essence of Christianity,
Das Wesen des Christentums (1900; What Is Christianity?).
The call had come to purge Christianity of what Harnack called traces
of “acute Hellenization,” the Greek ideas of essence, substance, and
being that were introduced into the Christian tradition in its early
history. The focus was shifted to the Fatherhood of God and the
announcement of the Kingdom, as Jesus had proclaimed in the Gospels.
While this approach matched the thirst for simplification in the minds
of many of the Christian faithful, it also diminished the concept of
God. The result was a form of Christian humanism that more traditional
Christians regarded as a departure from the essence of Christianity.
This view claimed to be based on the historical Jesus, but scholars
could not agree on the details.
Throughout the modern period some thinkers took another route toward
expressing the essence of Christianity. The notion that the theologians
would never find the essence of Christianity grew among German Pietists,
among the followers of John Wesley into Methodism, and in any number of
Roman Catholic or Protestant devotional movements. Instead, according to
these groups, the Christian essence was discernible in acts of piety,
closeness to the fatherly heart of God as shown in the life of Jesus,
and intimate communion with God on emotional or affective—not cognitive,
rational, or substantial (i.e., doctrinal)—grounds. Although these
pietisms have been immensely satisfying to millions of modern believers,
they have been handicapped in the intellectual arena when pressed for
the definitions people need in a world of choice.
Some modern Christians have shifted the topic from the essence of
Christianity to its absoluteness among the religions. They have been
moved by what the Germans called Religionswissenschaft, the study of
world religions. In that school, the focus fell on the sacred, what the
German theologian Rudolf Otto called “the idea of the Holy.” On those
terms, as the German scholar Ernst Troeltsch showed, it was more
difficult to speak of the “absoluteness” of Christianity and its truth;
one had to speak of it on comparative terms. Yet some early 20th-century
comparativists, such as the Swedish Lutheran archbishop Nathan
Söderblom, applied their understanding of the study of religion to help
animate the movement for Christian reunion.
The modern ecumenical movement is based upon the belief that the
church has different cultural expressions that must be honoured and
differing confessional or doctrinal traditions designed to express the
essential faith. These traditions demand criticism, comparison, and
perhaps revision, with some possible blending toward greater consensus
in the future. At the same time, supporters of the movement have shown
that, among Christians of good will, elaborations of what constitutes
the essence of Christianity are as confusing as they are inevitable and
necessary.
Despite this confusion, the ecumenical movement was an important
development in the 20th century. It took institutional form in the World
Council of Churches in 1948, which was composed of Protestant and
Eastern Orthodox churches. The World Council emerged out of two
organizations that offered distinct approaches to the essential concepts
of the faith. One approach was devoted first to “Life and Work,” a view
that the essentials of Christianity could be best found and expressed
when people followed the way or did the works of Christ, since this
constituted his essence. The other approach, concerned with “Faith and
Order,” stressed the need for comparative study of doctrine, with
critical devotion to the search for what was central. By no means did
these groups cling any longer to the notion that when they found unity
they would have found a simple essence of Christianity. Yet they
believed that they could find compatible elements that would help to
sustain them on the never-ending search for what was central to the
faith tradition.
Some modern scholars—for example, the British theologian John
Hick—viewing the chaos of languages dealing with the essentials of the
faith and the complex of historical arguments, pose the understanding of
the essence in the future. They speak of “eschatological verification,”
referring to the end, the time beyond history, or the time of
fulfillment. In that future, one might say, it will have become possible
to assess the claims of faith. Theologians of these schools argue that
such futuristic notions motivate Christians and the scholars among them
to clarify their language, refine their historical understandings, and
focus their devotion and spirituality.
The church and its history » The essence and identity of Christianity »
The question of Christian identity
These comments on the search for the essence of Christianity, the task
of defining the core of the faith tradition, demonstrate that the
question of Christian identity is at stake at all times. What the
psychologist Erik Erikson said of the individual—that a sense of
identity meant “the accrued confidence that one’s ability to maintain
inner sameness and continuity . . . is matched by the sameness and
continuity of one’s meaning for others”—can be translated to the
concerns of the group. This means that Christians strive, in the midst
of change, to have some “inner sameness and continuity” through the
focus on Jesus Christ and the way of salvation. At the same time,
Christians posit that this identity will be discoverable by and useful
to those who are not part of the tradition: secularists, Buddhists,
Communists, or other people who parallel or rival Christian claims about
truth and salvation.
On these terms, writers of Christian history normally begin
phenomenologically when discussing Christian identity; that is, they do
not bring norms or standards by which they have determined the truth of
this or that branch of Christianity or even of the faith tradition as a
whole but identify everyone as Christian who call themselves Christian.
Thus, from one point of view, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, or the Mormons as they are commonly called, is, in the view of
scholar Jan Shipps, “a new religious tradition.” The followers of the
Book of Mormon incorporated the Old and New Testaments into their
canon—just as the New Testament Christians incorporated the entire
scripture of a previous tradition—and then supplied reinterpretations.
As a new religious tradition, Mormonism would not be Christian. But
because Mormons use Christian terminology and call themselves Christian,
they might also belong to a discussion of Christianity. They may be
perceived as departing from the essence of Christianity because other
Christians regard their progressive doctrine of God as heretical. Yet
Mormons in turn point to perfectionist views of humanity and progressive
views of God among more conventionally accepted Christian groups. In
areas where the Mormons want to be seen as “latter-day” restorers,
basing their essential faith on scriptures not previously accessible to
Christians, they would be ruled out of conventional Christian discussion
and treatment. Yet they share much of Christian culture, focus their
faith in Jesus, proclaim a way of salvation, and want to be included for
other purposes, and thus fall into the context of a Christian identity
at such times.
This phenomenological approach, one that accents historical and
contemporary description and resists prescription, does not allow the
historian to state the essence of Christianity as a simple guide for all
discussion. It is necessary for the scholar to put his own truth claims
in a kind of suspension and to record faithfully, sorting out large
schools of coherence and pointing to major strains. It is not difficult
to state that something was a majority view if the supporting data are
present. For example, it is not difficult to say what Roman Catholics at
particular times have regarded as the essence of Christianity or what
the various Orthodox and Protestant confessions regard as the true way
of salvation. Someone using the phenomenological method, however, would
stand back and refuse to be the arbiter when these confessional
traditions disagree over truth.
Vincent of Lérins, then, speaks more for the hunger of the Christian
heart or the dream of Christian union than for the researcher, who finds
it more difficult to see a moment when everyone agreed on everything
everywhere. Yet it remains safe to say that Christian identity begins
and ends with a reference to Jesus in relation to God’s truth and a way
of salvation. The rest is a corollary of this central claim, an infinite
set of variations and elaborations that are of great importance to the
separated Christians who hold to them in various times and places.
Martin E. Marty
