What is Christianity?

Christianity is not, at its foundation, a religion of rules, rituals or self-improvement. It is a claim about something that happened. God — the one who made everything — entered his own creation as a man, lived a life without sin, died a criminal's death carrying the guilt of humanity, and rose bodily from the grave three days later.

Everything else in the Christian faith is either the background to that event or its consequence. Remove it and nothing is left but ethics that other traditions teach better and more cheaply.

Where the name comes from

The followers of Jesus did not choose their own name. Luke records almost in passing that "the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch" (Acts 11:26) — probably as a nickname from outsiders, roughly "the Messiah's people". They had called themselves followers of the Way (Acts 9:2). The label stuck because it was accurate: the movement was not organised around a philosophy or a place, but around a person.

The three claims everything rests on

One: God is there, and he made everything. The universe is not a brute fact that happens to exist. It is a creation, which means it has a purpose and a shape, and so do you. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). This is why Christians hold that human dignity is discovered rather than assigned — you bear the image of God whether or not anyone recognises it (Genesis 1:27).

Two: something has gone badly wrong, and we are implicated in it. The Bible's word for this is sin, and it means far more than breaking rules. It is a rupture in the central relationship of existence — humanity holding the gifts and refusing the Giver. "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). This is not a claim about how badly individuals behave relative to each other; it is a claim about where every one of us stands relative to God.

Three: God has acted to repair it himself. Not by sending a message, or a code, or another prophet. By coming. "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). The cross is God taking the consequence of human sin into himself; the resurrection is the public receipt that it was accepted.

What Christianity is not

It is not a Western religion. The faith was born in Roman-occupied Judea, spread first across the Middle East, into Mesopotamia, Persia, India and North Africa, and only later became dominant in Europe. Ethiopia had a Christian kingdom in the fourth century. Kerala in south India has churches tracing to the first. When someone calls Christianity the white man's religion, they are describing nineteenth-century missionary politics, not the religion's actual history — and they are erasing the African and Asian churches that are older than the European ones.

It is not a moral code with God attached. Christianity certainly produces changed behaviour, but it does not start there and it cannot be reduced to it. Paul's summary is blunt: "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). No other religion's founder made his entire system falsifiable by a single historical event. Paul is effectively saying: check the tomb.

It is not a claim to be better than other people. The New Testament's picture of a Christian is not a good person who was noticed by God but a bankrupt one who was rescued. "God justifies the ungodly" (Romans 4:5). Any version of the faith that produces superiority has misunderstood its own foundation.

Why it will not let you stay neutral

Jesus said: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). There are only three honest reactions to a sentence like that. He was right; he was lying; or he was unwell.

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell.— C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Lewis's point is not that the argument settles the matter. It is that the popular fourth option — a wise teacher whose divine claims we quietly set aside — is not available, because those claims are woven through everything else he said. You have to decide what to do with the man, and indifference is itself a decision.

How a person becomes a Christian

Not by being born into a Christian family. Not by attending services. Not by improving.

"If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved" (Romans 10:9). Two movements, and they belong together: repentance — turning from running your own life — and faith — trusting Christ's work rather than your own record.

Jesus called this being born again (John 3:3). The metaphor is deliberate. Birth is not something you achieve by effort; it is something that happens to you, after which everything is different and growth begins. Reformation of behaviour is the fruit. It is not the root.

What follows

A Christian is not a finished person. They are someone who has changed direction, been given God's own Spirit (Romans 8:9), and joined a community with the same story. What follows is a lifetime of learning to live inside a rescue that has already happened — which is what the rest of this library exists to help you do.