This blog entry was prompted by a thread started by @TonyChanYT at the Christianity Board forum. Tony asked what it means to "fall away." As he noted, to say someone has fallen away assumes he or she was a believer in the first place. This predictably led to a discussion of what it means to be a believer.
I've brought the discussion to my blog so I can make the points I want to make without being interrupted by those pesky nuisances who disagree with me.
At The Little Church of What O'Darby Believes, interrupting our beloved pastor will get you excommunicated faster than spilling your Guinness Stout on his blue suede shoes.Does anyone deny the following premise? Jesus' message – meaning what one must believe in order to enter the kingdom of God – must be understandable to the dullest of us.
If it's the message of salvation for all the world, it can't be anything too intellectually sophisticated – right?
Does anyone deny this premise? Jesus' ministry during His lifetime was for those who heard and followed Him then, not strictly for those in the future after He had been resurrected and ascended.
From the moment His ministry began, winning souls was one of His objectives – right?
I waded into Tony's thread when someone suggested that to be a believer requires a belief in Jesus' Resurrection and that He atoned for one's sins.
Wait, I responded, this would mean there were no believers in Jesus' lifetime. It would further mean that to be a believer requires some grasp of the theological concepts of sin and Atonement. Jesus' earthly ministry would have been entirely preparatory, not really for the salvation of those who actually knew and followed Him during His lifetime (unless, I suppose, they were fortunate enough to be living after the Resurrection and came to understand its theological significance).
Well, came the reply, before He died Jesus certainly alluded to His future Resurrection and what He was all about. Sorta kinda, I suppose, but not really outside of His immediate circle, and even they mostly either didn't believe or had no idea what He was talking about.
This, to me, is one of the curious things about "Christianity" (the quotation marks being intended to suggest "the belief system that calls itself Christianity but may not actually have much to do with what Jesus was actually talking about"): Some of the most central doctrines – the THINGS YOU GOTTA BELIEVE TO BE A REAL CHRISTIAN – received scarcely any attention from the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels or the even more pared-down version whom scholars call the "historical Jesus." When He confronted sinners, He never pulled out the a first century version of the Four Spiritual Laws and walked them through the plan of salvation.
Why did He merely say to the woman taken in adultery "Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more" – I mean, what the heck? Did He not blow a golden opportunity to save her (and perhaps her accusers) right there by demanding she believe and repent?
I then weighed in on what I think it means to be a believer and to fall away. Here, you may note, I take a position contrary to what I said in my previous blog entry, "The One Christian Essential."
The One Christian Essential
Without a unique, real-world Resurrection, there is no Christianity.
www.christianityboard.com
If this were true, however, it would mean there were no believers before the Resurrection – precisely as the other participant suggested. I don't believe this can possibly be the case. When Zacchaeus said he would give half his possessions to the poor and restore those he had cheated fourfold, Jesus replied "Today salvation has come to this house." Today, not after the Resurrection or after Zacchaeus had grasped the significance of the Atonement.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the fathers of American Transcendentalism, said that. He meant that only little minds refuse to admit inconsistencies in their thinking. So I'm prepared to admit that believing in the Resurrection can't have been essential to being a believer before Jesus was resurrected. Duh.
I should've simply said that any other view of the Resurrection is inconsistent with Christianity, not that accepting the Resurrection has always been required, even before it had taken place. Once it did take place, believing in a real-world, empty-tomb, historical Resurrection is indeed what distinguishes a Christian from a mere admirer of Jesus.
I now suggested on Tony's thread that what it means to be a believer is pretty simple: It means to believe and trust that Jesus was sent by God and to attempt to live according to His message – basically the Golden Rule with a large dose of mercy and compassion. (I might now add something like "uniquely" sent by God and expand the second part to "recognize the application of His message to oneself and attempt to live according to it.") Anyone who heard Jesus during His lifetime could have been a believer by this standard, and many surely were. Anyone today could be a believer, and many surely are.
By my bare-bones definition, to fall away would then be to either (or both) stop believing Jesus was uniquely sent by God or cease attempting to live according to His message.
Oh, dear, this provoked howls of protest. I appeared to be promoting some sort of – cover your ears – SOCIAL GOSPEL!!! This loaded phrase now means, of course, uncritically celebrating the entire LGBTQ+ agenda, voting for Democratic candidates, recognizing all religions as paths to God, and pretty much abandoning any distinctiveness at all to Jesus or the Christian message.
Uh, no. Attempting to live by the Golden Rule, mercy and compassion does not require any of these things. Yes, I actually do believe Jesus' ministry was much more about "how you should live" than "what you must believe" and might reasonably be called a social gospel, but without all the baggage this phrase brings with it to the minds of many today.
Nor do I think my definition loses the distinctiveness of Christianity. Believing Jesus was uniquely sent by God involves far more than just thinking He was a godly man or prophet. Since the Resurrection has occurred, I think believing it as a real-world event is indeed the one Christian essential – it is the one thing that stamps Jesus as unique in God's plan for humanity. But those living during Jesus' lifetime could likewise have believed in His uniqueness. Many surely thought He was the Jewish Messiah while having a seriously erroneous expectation of what this actually meant; this is precisely why they were crushed by the Crucifixion. Others surely recognized Him, His life and His message as unprecedented and unique without a full grasp of who and what He was.
The simplicity of my view predictably generated responses in the vein that no, being a believer is almost entirely a matter of what we believe – believing and promoting the RIGHT THINGS and pointing out the errors in others' thinking. This is, I believe, precisely how "Christianity" has turned into a fractured, fragmented religion unlike anything Jesus was talking about or had in mind. (Indeed, it very quickly turned into this. The fractured, fragmented state of Christianity in the first-, second- and third centuries was not unlike today, and the Ecumenical Councils from First Nicaea in 325 AD to Second Nicaea in 787 focused largely on trying to negotiate some sort of orthodoxy.)
Those with the RIGHT THINGS perspective assured me that Jesus' message includes the Gospel of John, Paul's epistles, Hebrews, Revelation and all the rest of the New Testament. It's way bigger than just the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels. You GOTTA BELIEVE at least a large portion of this stuff to be a believer.
Ya think? I don't. The Jesus of John's Gospel is far different from the Jesus of the Synoptics or the so-called historical Jesus, and some of the most limiting and divisive doctrines have their origin entirely in John. There is a reason many call Paul the inventor of Christianity. There is a reason the inclusion of Revelation in the NT was highly controversial and the book just barely squeaked in. John's Gospel and some of Paul's writings are profound, but I believe John, Paul, Revelation and Emperor Constantine are largely responsible for "Christianity" becoming something far different from anything Jesus had in mind. (Just as many regard Paul as the inventor of Christianity, many regard Constantine as the worst thing that ever happened to Christianity. By making it an official state religion, he opened the door to it becoming just another worldly power structure.)
It's human nature – fallen human nature, mind you – to want to be "right" at the expense of others being "wrong." Nowhere is this more evident than in religion, where the stakes are the highest. When we're talking about things like God, salvation and eternity, we can't handle an inclusive simplicity that admits the mystery, ambiguity and uncertainty that is inherent in all religion. We can't handle the possibility that those who believe differently may qualify as believers, too – or may even be right!
By this RIGHT THINGS approach, a Southern Baptist who defects to the Catholics or Jehovah's Witnesses has "fallen away," and ditto for a Catholic or Jehovah's Witness who defects to the Southern Baptists. The defectors no longer believe the right things, even if their lives look exactly like they did before their defection. This surely can't be what the earthly Jesus who walked the hills of Galilee in 30 AD had in mind – can it?
I don't say these things just to be irritating or provocative. As I said to the participant who most strongly disagreed with me on Tony's thread, I accept that he is a good and faithful Christian brother who is speaking the truth as he understands it. I simply believe that while this is one understanding of what it means to be a believer, I can't accept that it is the only valid one or that the flesh-and-blood first-century Jesus could possibly have had this narrow understanding in mind. The Good News, which is supposed to universal, liberating, simple and uplifting, becomes more like a theological straitjacket.
Or so it seems to me. As I always say, your mileage may vary.
