What is a Christian?

This seems like it should be a simple question. “Christian” means “little Christ” or even “like-Christ.” So, anyone who attempts to be like Christ is a Christian, yeah? I mean, I’ve had this stated to me outright more than a few times over the years whenever I try to challenge one’s definition of Christianity.

But this is incorrect, even from a biblical standpoint. Because while, yes, the Bible does note that there’s a moment where these followers of Jesus’ disciples are called “Christian,” there is a broader bit of context to consider.

The people who would one day become known as “Christians” were originally called people of “the Way.” “Christian” was a later term applied to them, by the people of Antioch (with plenty of folks out there postulating that this might have been intended as an insult). So they were branded with this name, which they later embraced. But it was not the term that they first applied to themselves—nor was it a term Jesus gave them, at least not in a direct sort of way.

This is all to say that, in order to understand what it means to be “Christian,” we first have to consider what it meant to be people of “the Way.”

For starters, what was “the Way?” Perhaps the most concise answer to this question is provided by Jesus Himself: “I am the way, the truth, and the life; no one gets to the Father, except through me.” Now, the term “way” was already a loaded term for Jesus. As a Jew, He would’ve been taught that the Torah was “the way” to God. Following the commandments given by Moses and expanded by scribes and religious teachers continues to be the means by which Jews understand their life and relationship to God. Keeping these things puts them on the path (or, “way”) to God.

Regardless of what one might think about the theological claims about Jesus, He was very clearly a religious reformer/revolutionary. In the gospels, we see Him taking umbrage with the labyrinthine interpretations of the Law that were foisted upon every day people; we see Him opposed to a predatory financial system rooted in the Temple’s religious customs; we even see Him willing to buck deeply held notions around women and non-Jews. Jesus is very interested in expressing a different way of not only being Jewish, but also a different way for non-Jews to have a relationship with the God of Judaism (who was believed and proclaimed as THE God). Jesus lays out—in two sermons, acts of healing, and various parables—an alternative way of living, an actual practice, which He Himself embodies. And so when we get to that famous line in John’s gospel about Him being “the way” what He’s effectively saying is: “go where I go, live a life like mine, and you will see God, you will achieve what the Torah is all about.”

But Jesus’ followers came to see Him as more than an ethicist or reformer. Beyond those dimensions, indeed the soil from which those dimensions sprout, His followers see Him as God, living in human flesh. Which means there emerges a theological dimension to both understanding and following Jesus. And this is the thing that Christians spend their first 300 years or so hammering out, resulting in the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinoplian Creeds.

Today, it’s easy for us to look at those theological arguments and wonder what the big deal was all about. But try and consider things from the perspective of the ancients. They were trying to understand precisely who it was they were following and why they should follow Him at all. Because if He’s fully God as well as man, or a simply a human endowed with spiritual power, or even a sort of demigod, there are ramifications to what it means to follow Him.

The kernel of these ideas were held by those first people, articulated as “the Way.” So, this movement later rebranded as Christian carries with it pre-existing theological baggage that continues once the new name for the movement takes hold. It’s not simply a movement of people trying to live an ethical life akin to the one Jesus did. It’s a group of people who do this while also worshipping Jesus as God. Which means that “Christian” is a term that carries particular meanings rooted in both a way of life and a way of worship.

Theology requires a grammar. The conventional term for this grammar is “doctrine.” Misused, “doctrine” is about lines in the sand that separate degrees of faithfulness and rightness before God. But the correct view of doctrine is that it provides the boundaries for what makes a particular theology or religion definably itself. Further, those doctrines inform practices meant to embody what that theology or religion has to say or mean for its adherents.

Dance is a helpful example. There is a clear grammar to dance—whether hula, or ballet, or modern, etc. But once that grammar begins to be stripped away we begin to see something other than dance: perhaps floor gymnastics, or a form of martial arts. This is not to say that dance cannot innovate. It simply means that we have to either review the grammar of dance, or delineate when something ceases to be dance because it has strayed into a space where it uses a different grammar.

Consider the phenomenon of the modern smartphone. Many of us continue to refer to the device as a “phone” but it is completely unrecognizable from the device that Alexander Graham Bell first invented. Now, the “phone” portion of the device is a piece of software and part of what is actually a small personal computer. There is a clear line of recognizability from the wall-mounted telephone of yesteryear and the cellular telephone (today referred to as a feature phone). But the modern smartphone is built more from the design language (that is, “grammar”) of the personal MP3 player than it is the telephone.

Christianity is like this. The doctrines of the faith are what make it definable, following a trajectory of development where we can see certain commonalities in both belief and practice. At the same time, we have also seen a certain degree of disruption (to use the term in its tech-industry, startup sense), largely in the form of the Protestant Reformation, that has affected this notion and has lead us to a place where we have multiple things calling themselves “Christian” while only a few can be accurately identified by that term.

Which leads me, finally, to answer my initial question: what is a Christian?

A Christian is a person who follows Jesus as He has been understood by the Church. By this I mean that Christians believe in Jesus as He is articulated in the Creeds (particularly the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds), and both worship and follow Him in the particular ways defined by the heritage of the Church. Christianity is practiced, not simply “believed.” It is the result of the out-working of what it means to follow Jesus and who Jesus is, placed amidst a trajectory (tradition) of continual out-working. Christianity carries continuity—of both practice and belief.

This is not to say that Christianity is something frozen in time. Rather, it is to suggest that innovations within Christianity (say, the ordaining of women to the priesthood, or same-sex marriage) have to carry continuity with what came before, either through a form of historic recovery (in the case of women’s ordination) or integration into that continuous stream (in the case of same-sex marriage).

The Creeds, as a source of Christian grammar, offer flexibility. They are “what” statements, not “how” statements. This means that there is wiggle-room in how these things are understood. However, there is not wiggle room in regards to the “What” being stated about Christian belief. For instance, we can differ on what it means when we say that we “believe in the resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting” (Saint Augustine of Hippo to Pierre Tielhard de Chardin offers a pretty solid range), but if we say that there is no resurrection of the dead and/or life everlasting then we have broken the boundaries of Christian grammar and are now speaking a different theological language. Similarly, the moment we elevate the Bible to a place traditionally occupied by Jesus, seeing it (and not Him) as the “authoritative Word of God,” we’ve also crossed a key boundary of Christian grammar and are now speaking a different religious language (the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy is probably the most notable instance of this, and held as the standard statement on “Biblical inerrancy” throughout much of Evangelicalism—interestingly, the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 seems to have amended its wording to better reflect that Jesus is the main revelation and the Bible is merely a testament to that fact; so not all Evangelical denominations are created equal here, it seems).

Additionally, there is a continuity of Christian practice that constitutes this grammar: gathered together as people who have been baptized, to share in bread and wine, informed by the reading and expounding of the scriptures and the singing of hymns and psalms, all assembled in an ordered fashion. And from this gathering emerges a way of life, an ethic, itself reflective of a particular grammar of action.

So, to be “Christian” is to be a particular thing. This is why Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons cannot rightly claim the name “Christian.” Yes, they profess Jesus. But their understanding of who Jesus is resides outside the grammar defined by the Creeds (which, by the way, are themselves a kind of summary of what the Bible is all about), by rejecting His divinity. They might be cousins to the Christian faith, but they are cousins removed (akin to the relationship between Muslims and Jews—both claim the same God, but they each have a unique grammar in regards to that God). “Christianity” loses coherence when we fail to assert these facts—which has led us to where we are today, with neo-fascists espousing abhorrent ideas and calling them “Christian.”)

Lastly, let me be clear about another point: saying that someone is not “Christian” is not the same thing as saying that they are headed for damnation. Jesus saying “no one gets to the Father apart from me” is, in my faithful estimation, Him saying that He’s the one who decides the ultimate fate of human souls in the afterlife. I tend to believe that, in time, everyone is welcomed into the always-open gates of the New Jerusalem. But, ultimately, Jesus is the one who saves. Not me. Not any particular institution. Rather, the Church is the place that gives us the language for what it means to be saved, to live into what Jesus has already done. Christianity is, as far as I’m concerned, this profoundly beautiful thing that allows us to live with the freedom that comes with being saved by Jesus. It gives us the language by which we can live thankfully in the light that we no longer feel we have to save ourselves, making it all up as we go along.

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The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Christianity #Church #Jesus #History #Politics #Bible #religion #theology

A very stupid thing I made a few years back

I’m writing this on “Fat Tuesday,” the day before Ash Wednesday. I have numerous bulletins to make, as well as preparing the ashes, but the brain God gifted me with needs the dopamine produced by posting this entry before it can get to work on those other things. Plus, I’m trying to develop a discipline of writing, which means I really ought to be doing this right?

Anyway, Lent begins tomorrow. It marks 40 days of fasting and spiritual discipline for the majority of Christians around the world (Evangelicals not included—they don’t really observe Lent), kicked off for Western Christians by the observance of Ash Wednesday. This is a day where we go to church and have ashes smeared on our heads (or sprinkled on them) as a reminder of two things: we sin and we die. It is meant to get us in touch with the frailty of our humanity as a way to underscore the magnanimity of what Jesus did in re-orienting our humanity through His life, death, resurrection, and ascension.

But I look at things in much of the world right now and I’m not so sure we need the ashes to remind us of these facts. Ukraine and Gaza (as well as the under-reported turmoil of what is happening throughout Africa, particularly in the Congo region) are stark reminders of the ubiquity of death. And the current state of things in the United States is perhaps the clearest reminder to us that sin is far from gone in the world—and also demonstrating to us how sin and death inform each other. Furthermore, Lent itself is a season of voluntary austerity and deprivation. Lent, in a way, assumes a degree of “affluence” as the “norm” and “deprivation” as the outlier. Given the direction of the economy, Lent feels less like a thing we Christians choose to enter into for a time and more the general reality in which we are moving.

So, why bother? I mean, can we even afford to do Lent this year? Since much will likely be taken away as this administration goes on, wouldn’t we be better off using the time we have as a sort of extended Mardi Gras and treat ourselves until we can’t? Shouldn’t we take the advice of the wise Preacher in Ecclesiastes and “eat drink and be merry” since everything around is “a puff of smoke” and “chasing the wind?”*

Well, this more or less assumes the Western Christian view of Lent. Eastern Christianity (think Greek or Coptic) has a different mindset. For Eastern Christians (whose theology is arguably more reflective of ancient Christianity), Lent is about balance. See, in Eastern Christian practice, one fasts for about half the year and feasts for the rest. This serves as a kind of balance for the earth and our bodies, similar to the YinYang thinking of East Asia or the Ku/Hina thinking of ancient Hawai’i. And this can have notable economic repercussions in Christian societies.

There’s an old tale that gets repeated (one that I’ve been known to parrot myself) that says that fish was deemed appropriate for Lent due to the lobbying of fishmongers. Apparently there is no evidence to support this story. But this does not negate the fact that fasting can carry implications for resisting the “principalities and powers” of our current economic reality. The food industry, for instance, wants to dominate our kitchens and push the kinds of foods they want us to eat. They want us to lean into excess. In his 2016 documentary series Cooked, food author Michael Pollan notes that the sort of foods pushed on us are foods that, if we were to cook them ourselves, would be excessively time-consuming. Think about French fries, for instance. We view them as basically “filler.” But consider what it takes to make French fries: growing potatoes, peeling them, slicing them, blanching them, then frying them. Think about all the little prepackaged cakes or tubs of ice cream in our freezers. Their delectability is largely informed by the difficulty that comes in making these things ourselves. But that labor is outsourced and now these things are largely treated as staples in the Western diet and not the exceptional items they’re really supposed to be.

And the food industry is making bank on that fact.

Pollan’s documentary further notes that the food industry sold us on these things by hammering us with messages that reinforce how stressful our lives are, thus pressuring us into buying their products as a means to relieve some degree of stress. Capitalism selling us their solutions to the problems they created. And the messages are only getting stronger and stronger. The stress and chaos of this administration in the United States is very good for business (and probably why so many CEO-types have gone hard for Trump in the first place).

So, fasting becomes a form of refusal, a form of resistance. It also becomes self-empowering in a way because it can help us remember that we can make choices free of corporate and political pressures.

Saint Paul asserts that while we are at war, our war “is not against blood and flesh”. Which means that we don’t fight this war in the same way we might fight others. The Chinese theologian Watchman Nee notes that Saint Paul’s instructions in this passage are rooted in a defensive stance and not a march into battle. Which means, quite literally, that our war against the spiritual forces that assail us is waged as resistance.

So, food can become a tool in that resistance. Refusing to eat certain foods becomes an act of resistance against the very forces that capitalize on our stress and fear.

But the fasting of Lent is not only a curbing of the foods we eat. It’s also the giving up of certain activities. There’s been much press about the various economic blackouts people are participating in right now. What if we made every Wednesday and Friday (the traditional days of general fasting for ancient Christianity) in Lent a “buy nothing” day? And alongside that maybe consider using any money we save from our refusals and give it to various people (software engineers, journalists) that could really use the money?

Yes, we are facing a reality of involuntary austerity. But Lent is more than just a time of tightening the belt for some vague spiritual benefit. It is about a life of balance. It is a tool in a war of resistance against the very power of Satan itself, manifested in the economic pressures foisted upon us by billionaires addicted to wealth and gaining it at our expense.

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Lent #Christianity #spirituality #religion #Church #Jesus #Episcopal #politics #economy

We are in the midst of a wave of what is now known as enshittification, which is a term coined by Canadian author Cory Doctorow on his blog, Pluaralistic. It’s a phrase that has taken parts of the internet by storm, a perfect word to describe how seemingly everything has gotten worse. (Apologies to anyone who is bothered by a priest using the word “shit,” by the way. I get that some Christians are offended by swearing, but Saint Paul pretty much uses the word “shit” in Philippians 3:8 when he considers his life before Christ as skybala, so make of that what you will.)

“Enshittification” is marked by four things, according to Doctorow:

first, [platforms] are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Notice that those four markers are not exclusive to technology, where the term “platform” could be used for just about any institution.

Including the Church.

Just think back to the 15th and 16th Centuries. The Church had been good. It managed to change the direction of the Roman Empire and even managed to preserve elements of culture and society after the fall of that empire. It was nimble and adaptive to the needs of people in the agrarian days of the early Medieval period and managed to counterbalance the worst impulses of kings and lords (for the most part) because kings and lords were seen as subservient to the lordship of Christ Jesus and His Church, which wielded the power of excommunication as a way to keep things in check. But then, kings and lords wanted more from the Church, an institution they were largely funding. Further, many of the bishops had been welcomed into the halls of wealth and power and now saw themselves largely in political terms rather than spiritual. So the laity began to be exploited through practices like the selling of indulgences (used to fund wars and, later, the construction of Saint Peter’s at the Vatican). Then, the bishops began to exploit the lords and kings to get what they wanted (just consider the story of Henry IV traveling in the snow to get the pope to reverse an excommunication). Then, we get the Reformation Era (which gave birth to my branch of the Church, known as Anglicanism).

Now, we see the same things happening in regards to Protestant Christianity, particularly the Evangelical side of things. Pro Publica is running an article about one of the several Evangelical pastors that are leveraging their spiritual influence in the service of political power. And the question is why? Why would any organization that calls itself Christian engage in this sort of thing?

Why would the Church ever return, like “a dog to its vomit,” to the well of enshittification?

It’s because Christians seem to forget what their religion is all about, largely because Christianity is a pretty inconvenient thing. We want to change the world, we rightly recognize that Jesus calls us to change the world. But the lure of doing such things quickly and conveniently is very very strong. Which I feel like we’ve heard something similar before...

Oh. Right.

I’m beginning to think more and more that “inconvenience” is a Christian virtue, a thing we need to embrace, cultivate, and value (I’ve plans to write more on this in the future). When we consider that the ancient rabbinical interpretation of the Fall was the result of the serpent telling Eve and Adam that they could short-cut their way to god-like-ness that the Holy One was moving them toward by eating that piece of fruit, we see that “convenience” or “expedience” becomes a very alluring temptation. Further, in a prophecy about Jesus found in the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Book of Wisdom (frequently called The Wisdom of Solomon) we read:

Let us lie in wait for the righteous man, because he is inconvenient to us and opposes our actions; he reproaches us for sins against the law, and accuses us of sins against our training. He professes to have knowledge of God, and calls himself a child of the Lord. He became to us a reproof of our thoughts; the very sight of him is a burden to us, because his manner of life is unlike that of others, and his ways are strange. (Wisdom 2:12-15, NRSV)

So, even the Bible itself acknowledges that the ways of Jesus are inconvenient, while also exposing the short-comings and even wickedness that come from a life of convenience. And those things result in Jesus being crucified. Which is all to say that convenience is powerful and can come with a dark side if we’re not attentive to it.

Christians, as with anyone else, are sinners. We know this, we confess this, we (are supposed to) try and overcome this. But, nevertheless, we live in a sinful world and it is very hard to successfully resist every day. (But this is why we also believe in grace—which is another topic for another time!) The allure of a short-cut to what we think we want is too strong. And so we make a concession here, another there, and then in time we have Rube-Goldberg-machined our way into abandoning our faith and/or calling a heresy or idolatry “Christian.”

Christians have an uneasy relationship with the so-called “separation of church and state.” Our faith demands that we be public and call on the public to repent and follow Jesus. This fact was not lost on some of our most ancient thinkers, most notable being Saint Augustine of Hippo, the great sage of Western (scholastic) Christianity. His mountainous masterpiece, The City of God, deals with the questions of Christians in political leadership. What he effectively argues is that Christians are baptized into a world affected by sin and so all things we humans develop are going to be marked by that fact in some way. But because we confess that sin and confess that Jesus has freed us from sin having lasting, defining power over us, we are able to see past the marks of sin and into a new way of being. So Augustine argues that the Church must make use of the systems of this world, but in such a way to move past the sin-defined flaws of those systems. Judicial punishment, for instance, is supposed to be understood by Christians as a tool that leads to people being restored into the community and not a means of punishment for the sake of punishment. Augustine understood that the guilt of the knowledge of the sin itself is more punishment than the law could ever apply, and so mechanisms of “punishment” are only to help an offender realize the sinfulness of their actions, so that they could come to a place of confession—which is the catalyst for repentance and restoration to the community.

In short, Saint Augustine argues that the Church make use of governmental systems in order to persuade people of what they ought to do, rather than coerce them. In effect, this subverts the systems of government, sinful as they are, in the aims of hopefully working them out of a job.

But, as we all know, persuasion is inconvenient. It takes time. Think of how hard it is to convince people to leave Facebook or Instagram in favor of the far superior experience of decentralized social media like Mastodon and Pixelfed. Wouldn’t it be easier, more convenient, to just force people to leave?

Wouldn’t it be easier if we could just vote the right people into office and get them to make people behave the way we think they should?

Such a view is deeply heretical, from a Christian perspective, because it attempts to supplant the work of God and put it into the hands of us people. Like the Marvel villain, The High Evolutionary, we convince ourselves that we can do it all faster and better because God is not behaving the way we think He ought.

The only way out of the cycle of enshittification is to properly repent and then continue to resist the lure of convenience.

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

header image by J Dean, via unsplash.com. The image of the Temptation of Christ is courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and is in the public domain

#christianity #church #enshittification #technology #culture #politics