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
