This question has been on my mind a lot as of late, partly due to my grandparents persistent question: Why don’t you join the [insert whatever the family member's church name] Church?; coupled with my freinds question: What is Anglicanism? I hope to tackle these two questions in a later post; because I feel that I can not answer either of these two questions without examining this one.
What is Christianity? Without having an answer to this question, any sort of further discussion is irrelevant and meaningless, as we have not the ground on which to look at it. I challenge you to answer this question in your faith as well.
This is my feeble attempt to do so.
The Christian Faith is, I will argue through out this blog, a way of interacting with the divine, or better yet, the divines way of interacting with us. Through out the Bible, we see God interacting one-on-one with humanity. God walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. But even when they walled themselves off from God, He continued to interact with humanity; He spoke with Noah and gave him the Ark; He appeared to Moses as a burning bush (not as a thundering voice from above, but in corporeal form as a bush) and lead the Nation of Israel a pillar of smoke; he dwelt with them in the tabernacle and in the temple; and through the Holy Spirit he spoke to the prophets.
And this interaction reached its climax when God the Son, Jesus Christ, submitted himself to be born of Humans, to live with humans, and to die for the sins of man at human hands, for the hope of their reconciliation to him. I think that this fact reveals a characteristic about God that should be celebrated for eternity. And I think nothing else says more about the faith than that fact.
But it is not the end of the story, not by a long shot.
For when Jesus Christ came amongst us, he revealed to us a new way of interacting with God, as God as a Human. He was born of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. At His baptism, God the Father and God the Holy Spirit both made themselves manifest (God the Father in his Voice, and God the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove) giving the world a radically new image of the Living God, One God in Three persons (although this belief was not hammered out until hundreds of years later)
While living, Christ taught his followers new interpretations of the ancient Jewish laws, interpretations centered around mercy, love, and relationship, as opposed to legalism and bureaucracy. He spoke of His Father in Heaven, who could be freely known by all. These teachings, coupled with countless miracles that he preformed, gave witness to a more complete reality, and a new way of knowing God.
Both the teachings of Christ and his Apostles, as well as the record of God’s interaction with the people of Israel are found accurately within the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.
This is the Christian Faith. It did not not take shape immediately. It took a few hundred years, councils, disagreements, wars, battles, letters, and writings before it completely was ironed out. It is run by humans, which means it isnt perfect. We have our disagreements, we have our schisms, there are still bumps and potholes on our road of faith. But imperfections aside, it is truly a beautiful thing.
+Alex Resurgent
Thursday 9 Ordinary Time 2008
