Understanding The Basics Of The Christian Faith

The longest church AGM I ever attended was not about money, staffing, safeguarding or whether we could afford to replace the leaking roof.

It was about whether a person must be baptised before they could become a church member.

Someone had proposed changing a sentence in the constitution, and you would have thought we were being asked to remove Jesus from Christianity altogether. People who had happily sat beside one another for years began lining up behind the microphone. Bibles were opened. Passages were quoted. One man warned that we were standing at the top of a slippery slope. Another said the proposed wording was too narrow and would exclude sincere Christians. Someone else wanted to know whether people baptised as infants would qualify, or whether only those baptised as believing adults could be admitted.

Then there was the question of method. Did sprinkling count, or did the person need to be fully submerged? Baptists believe you should be old enough to know what is happening before you go under. Anglicans are happy to baptise you before you can hold your own head up. Presbyterians sprinkle. Pentecostals prefer the full dunk. The Salvation Army has managed to follow Jesus for more than a century without baptising anyone at all.

Each tradition reads the same Bible and reaches a different conclusion about one of Christianity’s most basic practices.

The meeting dragged on well beyond its scheduled finish. The tea went cold. The biscuits disappeared. People shifted restlessly in hard plastic chairs while we debated not merely what our church required for membership, but how much a person had to believe — or do — before we could call them a Christian.

That question has stayed with me ever since.

Christianity contains thousands of denominations and an almost comical range of convictions. Christians disagree about baptism, communion, hell, salvation, sexuality, spiritual gifts, women in leadership, the authority of the Bible and what exactly happened on the cross. We cannot even agree on what happens after we die, which you would think might have been sorted out by now.

Obviously, not every disagreement disqualifies someone from being a Christian. But the opposite cannot be true either. If the word Christian can describe anyone, regardless of what they believe about Jesus or whether they have any intention of following him, then the word no longer describes very much at all.

There must be a line somewhere.

After two thousand years, we still cannot agree on where to draw it.

So, I’m Going to Have a Crack

At the risk of being branded a total heretic, I’m going to attempt something that two thousand years of councils, creeds, theologians and church splits have failed to settle once and for all.

I’m going to try to identify the absolute minimum a person must believe — or perhaps the commitment they must make — for the word Christian to retain any meaningful definition.

I should make one thing clear before the angry emails arrive: I’m not trying to decide who is saved. I’m more than happy to leave that decision with God. Nor am I deciding who should be welcomed into a church. If Jesus is any indication, our doors should probably be much wider than they are.

I’m asking whether Christianity has an irreducible centre.

To find it, we will need to remove everything Christians sincerely disagree about. That means temporarily setting aside our views on baptism, hell, biblical inerrancy, spiritual gifts, atonement theories, sexuality, church structures and the timing of the second coming. Those beliefs may matter, but none can be the defining test of Christianity if millions of people have followed Jesus without sharing them.

Whatever remains must be broad enough to include Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Pentecostals, progressives, conservatives, mystics and people whose faith is currently hanging by a thread. But it must also be specific enough to mean something. “Trying to be a good person” cannot be the whole definition, because billions of people who make no claim to Christianity are also trying to be good.

I don’t arrive at this question as a casual observer. I have spent most of my life studying the Bible. I have read it from cover to cover more times than I can remember, completed a theology degree, preached it, taught it and spent years trying to live by it. None of that makes me infallible. If anything, it has made me more aware of how much sincere Christians can disagree about what the Bible means.

But after all that reading, studying, preaching and arguing, I think the list of absolute non-negotiables is surprisingly short.

In fact, I think there are only seven.

Here are the bare minimum beliefs I think a person must hold for the word Christian to retain any meaningful definition.

1. God Is the Source of Everything

The first non-negotiable is fairly straightforward: God is ultimately behind the existence of everything.

That does not mean Christians must agree about how God created the universe. You can believe the world was made in six literal days, that it emerged over billions of years through natural processes, or that Genesis was never intended to provide a scientific account in the first place. You can accept evolution, the Big Bang and everything modern cosmology has discovered without surrendering this central claim.

The mechanism is negotiable. The source is not.

The Bible itself describes creation in several different ways. Genesis gives us poetry, pattern and sacred story. The Psalms describe the heavens declaring God’s glory. John’s Gospel says that all things came into being through the divine Word. None of these passages attempts to explain atoms, genetics, gravity or the expansion of the universe. Their concern is not primarily how the world began, but why there is a world at all.

Christianity begins with the conviction that reality is not meaningless or accidental. Something — or rather, Someone — stands behind it. The universe exists because God willed something beyond God into being.

That belief carries consequences. If the world comes from God, then the physical world cannot simply be dismissed as dirty, corrupt or spiritually irrelevant. Matter matters. Bodies matter. Animals, rivers, forests and ecosystems matter. Creation is not merely the disposable stage on which human souls audition for heaven. It belongs to God and is repeatedly described in Genesis as good.

Christians can — and do — disagree about nearly every detail of creation. But remove God from the picture entirely and we are no longer dealing with a different interpretation of Christianity. We have removed the starting point of the Christian story.

Before there was a church, a Bible, a doctrine of salvation or even a human being to believe anything, there was God.

And God brought everything else into being.

2. Every Person Bears the Image of God

The second non-negotiable is that every human being is created in the image of God and therefore possesses inherent worth.

The Bible introduces this idea before humanity has achieved anything. Before anyone builds a civilisation, keeps a commandment, joins the correct religion or demonstrates their usefulness, God declares that human beings bear the divine image.

That order matters.

Human dignity is not something we earn through intelligence, morality, productivity, independence or social standing. It does not increase when we succeed or disappear when we fail. It belongs to the unborn and the elderly, the disabled and the healthy, the prisoner and the prime minister, the believer and the atheist. It belongs to people we admire and people we would rather avoid.

Christians have various ideas about what the image of God actually means. Some locate it in our capacity for reason, relationship, creativity or moral choice. Others believe it refers to humanity’s vocation to represent God and care for creation. Perhaps it includes all of those things.

But whatever the image is, it cannot depend upon a particular human capacity. If intelligence, self-awareness or independence makes us valuable, then people who possess less of those qualities would somehow be less human. Christianity leaves no room for that conclusion. A person’s value rests in who they are, not in what they can contribute.

This belief should shape the way Christians treat other people. Racism, exploitation, abuse, dehumanising language and contempt are not merely social or political problems. They are theological violations. To degrade another human being is to disregard the image they bear.

Christian history contains far too many examples of believers failing this test. Christians have used Scripture to defend slavery, colonialism, segregation, violence and the exclusion of various groups. But those failures do not make the image of God less central. They reveal how easily Christians can profess a doctrine while denying it through their behaviour.

A Christianity that does not recognise the inherent dignity of every person has contradicted something fundamental about its own account of humanity.

You cannot claim to love the Creator while treating the people who bear the Creator’s image as though they are worthless.

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3. Something Has Gone Wrong

This is the one I am most hesitant to include because Christians have often used the language of sin to convince people they are disgusting, depraved and deserving of punishment.

I want nothing to do with that.

I do not believe human beings are born worthless. I do not believe God looks at us with disgust. We are made in the image of God, and nothing we do can erase our fundamental value.

But it is difficult to look honestly at the world and conclude that everything is fine.

Human beings are capable of extraordinary love, courage and generosity. We are also capable of violence, greed and cruelty. We hurt people we love. We tell lies to protect ourselves. We divide the world into people who matter and people who don’t. We build systems that allow some people to flourish at the expense of others.

Christians usually call this problem sin.

That word carries a lot of baggage. For some people, it brings back memories of preachers shouting about hell or churches obsessing over sex while ignoring pride, greed and abuse. But sin is not simply a list of things religious people are forbidden to do. It is the name Christianity gives to everything that damages our relationship with God, one another, ourselves and the world around us.

Christians disagree about where sin came from, whether guilt can be inherited and what exactly happened when Jesus died. I have my own views, including serious concerns about making punishment the centre of the cross. But none of those explanations needs to be part of Christianity’s bare minimum.

The non-negotiable is much simpler: something has gone wrong.

That does not mean everything has gone wrong. Human goodness is real. The image of God remains. Beauty, kindness and love can be found everywhere, including among people who want nothing to do with Christianity.

But so can suffering, selfishness and injustice.

Christianity looks at that mixture of beauty and brokenness and says this is not the way the world is supposed to be. Something within us, between us and around us needs to be healed.

We may disagree about how God does that.

But Christianity makes little sense unless we agree that something needs to be put right.

4. Jesus Shows Us What God Is Like

This is where the list becomes distinctly Christian.

Believing in a creator does not make someone a Christian. Neither does believing that people have inherent worth or that something has gone wrong with the world. People from many religions — and plenty of people with no religion at all — believe those things.

Christianity makes a much more specific claim: if you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.

Christians disagree about how to explain the relationship between Jesus and God. The early church spent centuries debating it, and the language it eventually developed — the Trinity, incarnation, fully God and fully human — is not always easy to understand. I don’t think someone needs to pass an exam on the Nicene Creed before they can call themselves a Christian.

But Jesus cannot be incidental to Christianity. He is not merely a helpful teacher whose sayings can be added to an otherwise complete belief system. He is the person Christians trust to show us the character of God.

That means the way Jesus treats people matters enormously.

He welcomes outsiders, touches those considered unclean, eats with people religion has rejected and repeatedly places compassion above rule-keeping. He forgives enemies, confronts hypocrisy and refuses to use violence to secure power. He describes God as a shepherd searching for one lost sheep, a woman looking for a missing coin and a father running towards a child who has wasted everything.

According to Christianity, these are not simply examples of Jesus being unusually kind. They reveal something true about God.

This also gives Christians a way to make sense of the more troubling pictures of God found in Scripture. When a biblical passage appears to portray God in a way that clashes with Jesus, Christians should not push Jesus aside to protect the passage. Jesus is our clearest picture. Everything else must be read in his light.

That does not mean Christians will agree about every word Jesus said or every claim made about him. We plainly do not. But if our picture of God looks nothing like Jesus — if it is less loving, less merciful and more eager to condemn — then something has gone wrong with our picture.

A person may still carry doubts about miracles, wrestle with doctrine and struggle to explain exactly how Jesus can be both human and divine. But Christianity cannot survive by reducing Jesus to an optional extra.

At its centre is the conviction that in Jesus, we see what God is like.

5. Jesus Died and Rose Again

This may be the point where my definition becomes less comfortable for some people.

I think the death and resurrection of Jesus belong among Christianity’s absolute non-negotiables. Not because everyone must hold the same theory about what happened on the cross, but because without these events, the Christian story loses its centre.

The crucifixion is the easier part. Jesus was executed by the Roman state. Christians may debate why he died and what his death achieved, but that he was crucified is one of the most widely accepted facts about his life.

The meaning of his death is far less settled.

Some Christians understand the cross primarily in terms of sacrifice or forgiveness. Others see it as God defeating the powers of sin and death, exposing the violence of human empires, entering fully into human suffering or demonstrating the depth of divine love. The New Testament uses several different images, and I don’t think accepting one particular explanation should be a condition of calling yourself a Christian.

You do not have to believe that God needed to punish Jesus before God could forgive you.

But I do think Christians must believe that something of enormous importance happened through his death.

Then there is the resurrection.

Christianity did not begin because Jesus left behind some memorable teachings. It began because his followers became convinced that the man they watched die was alive again. They did not simply believe his ideas had survived or that his influence would continue. They claimed that God had raised him from the dead.

Exactly what that resurrection looked like raises plenty of questions. The Gospel accounts themselves contain mystery and variation. Jesus can be touched and can eat, yet he also appears unexpectedly and sometimes goes unrecognised. His resurrected body seems continuous with the one that died, but it is also somehow transformed.

Christians can disagree about how to explain all of that. But I’m not sure Christianity remains Christianity if the resurrection is reduced to nothing more than the disciples remembering Jesus fondly after his death.

Paul is unusually direct about this. If Christ has not been raised, he says, Christian faith is empty. He understood that the entire Christian hope rested on the claim that death did not get the final word.

The resurrection means that the love revealed in Jesus was not defeated by the violence that killed him. It means that the way of Jesus is not merely noble but true. It is the first sign of what Christians believe God intends to do for the whole of creation.

We do not need to agree about every detail of the cross or explain the physics of resurrection.

But a recognisably Christian faith must still be able to say:

Jesus died.

And somehow, by the power of God, Jesus lives.

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6. Jesus Calls Us to Follow Him

The first five statements describe what Christians believe. This one asks what we do because we believe them.

If Jesus shows us what God is like, if his death and resurrection really matter, and if his way reveals the kind of life God intends for us, then Christianity cannot remain an idea we agree with from a distance. At some point, belief must become aaction.

To follow Jesus means allowing his life and teachings to shape the way we live. It means learning to love our neighbours, forgive those who hurt us, care for people who are overlooked, resist the temptation to dominate others and treat our enemies as human beings. It means telling the truth, practising mercy and recognising the image of God in people we have been taught to fear or despise.

Nobody does this perfectly. The first disciples certainly didn’t. They misunderstood Jesus, argued about status, tried to keep unwanted people away from him, abandoned him when he needed them and repeatedly failed to become the people he was calling them to be.

Yet they were still disciples because they kept following.

Following Jesus is not a claim that we have mastered his teachings or become morally superior to everyone else. It is a direction. We may stumble, wander and sometimes lose sight of the path entirely, but we continue returning to the person we have chosen to trust.

Nor do we follow Jesus to earn God’s love. We follow because we believe his way leads towards the life for which we were created.

This is why I don’t think someone can define being Christian entirely in terms of private belief. Christianity includes beliefs about who Jesus is, but it also includes a willingness to take him seriously enough to follow where he leads. A person may understand every doctrine on this list and still refuse the life those doctrines invite them into.

Christians will disagree about what following Jesus looks like in practice. We will not apply every teaching in precisely the same way. But some intention to learn from him, become like him and live according to his way must remain.

A Christian does not merely believe that Jesus is worth following.

A Christian attempts to follow him.

7. God Is Putting the World Right

The final non-negotiable is hope.

Christians disagree wildly about how the story ends. Some expect believers to be taken to heaven in the rapture. Others believe Christ will return to reign on Earth. Some picture eternal heaven and hell, while others hope that God will ultimately reconcile and restore all things. Christians cannot even agree on whether the Book of Revelation describes the future, the Roman Empire or a bit of both.

I don’t think agreement on any particular end-times timeline is required to be a Christian. You can keep your charts, beasts, bowls, trumpets and theories about who the Antichrist might be.

But Christianity does require the belief that God has not abandoned creation.

The Christian story begins with God calling the world good. It then tells of that world becoming wounded by violence, selfishness, suffering and death. The story cannot end with God throwing creation away and evacuating a small number of souls to somewhere else.

The Bible’s final hope is much larger than that. It speaks of resurrection, renewal and a new heaven and a new earth. It imagines God dwelling with humanity, tears being wiped away, death coming to an end and all creation being released from its suffering.

Ask ten Christians what all of that will actually look like and you may get ten different answers. We are far from united on what happens after death, how judgement works or who ultimately makes it through. What we do share is the hope that the story does not end with suffering, violence and death carrying the day. Somehow, God gets the last word.

This hope is not an excuse to ignore the suffering of the present world. If God intends to restore creation, then the work of healing, justice, reconciliation and peace matters now. Every time we repair what has been broken, resist what dehumanises people or bring life into a place of despair, we participate in the future towards which God is leading creation.

Christian hope is not that we will escape the world.

It is that God is putting the world right — and that, somehow, we are invited to become part of that work.

The Supernatural is The Believer's New Habitat

I am writing this out loud because so many Christians live their lives as if morality were what Jesus came to ask them to conform to. Churches safeguard heaven by insisting on sin consciousness and performative Christianity.

This was not what the Scripture meant when it described who the New Testament believer would become once he or she receives Christ and gets filled with the Holy Spirit.

The supernatural is the ultimate goal that every believer must reach for so that they can live as masters of reality in this world.

So, What Did I Leave Out?

I am under no illusion that everyone will agree with this list.

Some readers will already be mentally drafting their rebuttal. Others will be wondering how someone with a theology degree managed to leave out their favourite doctrine. A few may be preparing to inform me, with great Christian warmth, that I am not actually a Christian at all.

Come at me, bro.

I’m not claiming these are the only beliefs that matter. I am saying they are the beliefs without which Christianity stops making sense. Everything else belongs in the conversation, but not necessarily at the entrance.

Notice what is not on the list. Biblical inerrancy. Eternal conscious torment. Penal substitutionary atonement. The Trinity explained in exactly the right language. A particular view of baptism, communion, sexuality, spiritual gifts, women in leadership, church attendance or the end times. There is no political party, preferred worship style or sinner’s prayer.

That does not make those questions unimportant. It simply means Christians have reached different conclusions about them while continuing to place Jesus at the centre of their faith.

Perhaps the church would be healthier if we learned to distinguish between beliefs that define Christianity and beliefs that define our particular version of it. We could hold our convictions without pretending every disagreement is a threat to the gospel. We could spend less time guarding the boundaries and more time becoming the kind of people Jesus asked us to be.

Imagine if Christians became known for believing that creation is sacred, every person possesses God-given worth, broken things can be healed, Jesus reveals what God is like, death does not have the final word, his way is worth following and God is still putting the world right.

Would Christianity really be worse off?

I suspect it might finally look more like Christ.