Christianity

This is based on Encyclopaedia Britannica articles. For more detail, please find Encyclopaedia Britanica on the web at www.eb.com. Very many thanks to Anthony Murphy for ediiting various sections.

Introduction

Essence

Denominations

God Exists?

Christian god's character.

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. That tradition, viewed as a system of belief and behaviour, leads people to see Christianity as one of the world religions, alongside Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and others.

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 through the 20 centuries 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 as a kind of deposit. The agent of Christianity is the church, the community of people who make up the body of believers. Christianity may incorporate, along with such believers, their doctrines, customs, and historical episodes.

To say that Christianity "focuses" on Jesus Christ is to say that, whatever else it comprehends, somehow it brings these realities together in reference to an ancient historic figure. Few Christians 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 want to be nor would they be called Christian if they did not bring their eyes and 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 apparent when one tries to envision the more than 22,000 separate churches, sects, and denominations that make up the Christian faith tradition today. 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 cathedral-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 through the ages 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.

Scholars in the modern world have tended to locate 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, which allows for many gods, and atheism, which makes Jesus a purely and ordinarily human figure without divine or transcendent reference.

To monotheism as an element of the faith tradition of Christianity one may add that, with rare exceptions, Christianity refers to 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 their source in 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. The search for an essence may be more urgent for philosophers, theologians (who interpret the language of the believing community), or historians than it is for the regular believers who do not share the burden of scholars. 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 the mass of people do not have the scholar's problem of 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.

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