We should be warned by the absence of the word ‘Christian’ from the Bible. Well, I say absence but in fact the word occurs three times in the New Testament. The point, however, remains. We cherish simple slogans. We remember one-liners. We like fashionable words such as ‘fantastic’, ‘epicentre’ and ‘iconic’, without being too particular about what they actually mean. Consequently we run into an interesting problem. If the New Testament writers, Mark, John, Paul, and the rest had so little time for such a keyword, how else did they express themselves? Are we barking up the wrong tree by relying on the word ‘Christian’ so heavily? Here is an incentive to do some serious exploration of the Gospels and the other documents making up the New Testament.
So if we ask how the New Testament writers got along without this apparently indispensable word, we are obliged to consider other ways of putting things. We know that Jesus spent a lot of time delivering parables. Clearly he knew people were always ready to listen to stories. Often these were about the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom way of doing things. He also gave us – in the summary of his teaching called the Sermon on the Mount – a good deal of instruction about how we should behave. Not surprisingly this has captured people’s imagination and encouraged the conclusion that being a Christian is a matter of how we conduct ourselves. Christianity on this view is about behaviour.
This view prevails today. Despite the decline of Christian faith, it is still possible to hear people saying, ‘That was the Christian thing to do’ or: ‘He was a real Christian.’ We should not be surprised by this. Gibbon was on to something when he said of the early Christians: ‘They were more solicitous to explore the nature, than to practise the laws, of their founder.’
With that said, any reading of the New Testament documents makes it clear that a prominent and indeed primary aspect of Christian faith is belief in the incarnation and the resurrection of Jesus. The jailer in Philippi who asked: ‘Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’ was told: ‘Put your trust in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.’ Whatever was in the jailer’s mind – and he was clearly constrained by his office and an instinct for self-preservation – Paul and Silas had a straightforward answer for him. After a quick explanation of what that kind of belief was, the jailer and his family were baptized. Which is not to say that the jailer understood all the ins-and-outs of the Christian faith any more than most of us do but Luke makes it clear that belief came before behaviour in their scale of values. And Christmas is about what we believe more than about anything else.
POEM FOR CHRISTMAS EVE
For many Christmas has become hollow – a beanfeast without much significance. At the centre is a gap where there used to be belief in the incarnation. Hardy caught the wistfulness this led to in a beautiful little poem, The Oxen. It’s worth looking it out today. ‘If only’ is often a sad phrase. Hardy makes it something more than that.
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