N.T. Wright: What Is a Christian?

In this new series from N.T Wright Online, we're looking at the transformative elements of our Christian faith and how we are to think uniquely about them and let them transform our lifestyle. What does it mean to be a Christian? The first followers of Jesus didn't call themselves Christians. That was a nickname dreamed up some years down the track by people who tried to make sense of this strange new group that emerged in their midst and who seemed obsessed with the one that they called Christos, the Greek word for Messiah or the Anointed One. So they heard people talking about Christos, so they said they're Christians. And the Jesus followers themselves sometimes referred to their movement as The Way, which gives us a strong hint about what it meant, right from the beginning, to be a Christian. It is a way of life. Life conceived as a journey with a destination and guidelines for how to get there. And it is focused on the Christos, who they believed was Jesus, a real historical human being, a Palestinian Jew who lived and died in the first half of the first century AD, and whose followers believed that he was and is the Anointed One, the Christos, who had been promised by Israel's God, the one who would come and put the whole world right at last. That opens up a picture which many have sketched in three simple but profound statements. Each of these needs a good deal more unpacking, but they are a starting point. Being a Christian is about belonging to a family. It's about believing in the God revealed in Jesus. And it's about behaving in the way that he taught and demonstrated. Jesus's first followers didn't think they were starting something completely new. Like several other Jewish groups of the time, they believed that Israel's God, the creator of the world, had done what he had long promised and had renewed his ancient agreement with the descendants of Abraham two millennia before. Jesus himself had promised, though, that this renewed family would not be confined to what we might call one ethnic group, or, for that matter, any one social class. Within twenty years of Jesus's time, the apostle Paul could write that belonging to the Messiah's people had nothing to do with being Jewish or Gentile, or slave or free, or male or female. It was a new kind of family. How, then, did people come to belong to this family? Jesus himself spoke about people being born all over again. He linked this to baptism, which his cousin John had initiated as a sign that God was renewing his covenant, his ancient agreement, with his people. Jesus and his first followers also linked it directly to faith. And that brings us to the second point. Second then, believing in the God revealed in Jesus. Most people in Jesus's day believed in some sort of divine being or beings. The Jewish people believed in the one and only God of Abraham, the creator of the world. They believed that this God had at one time lived with his people in the temple in Jerusalem, and that he had promised to return after a long absence and put everything right. Jesus's followers believed that he had done just that in the person of Jesus himself, and that he had then come to live within them, each one, in the personally renewing presence and power of the Holy Spirit. This tight packed set of beliefs meant that Jesus's followers believed in the one God of Israel, but believed that this God had acted decisively and dramatically in fresh and unexpected ways. So believing couldn't simply be a matter of intellectual assent, though that was involved, too. It was about finding oneself addressed by God, transformed by God, drawn into the life and ongoing purposes of God, with a sense of the mysterious presence of Jesus himself, challenging and consoling, encouraging, warning, and guiding them. All this meant leaving behind anything and everything that went in other directions. For non-Jews, this meant abandoning the widespread traditional idolatry and the way of life that went with it. For Jewish people, it meant abandoning dreams of military revolt against Rome and trusting that their god was establishing his kingdom in a whole new way, with Jesus leading that way. So belonging and believing point together to the third point, which is behaving. From the beginning, Christians were not defined by their behavior, but they understood that their behavior had to be defined by their new identity. Jesus had now announced that God was at last becoming king, evoking the scriptural theme of God's kingdom, God returning to put everything right. So following Jesus meant, right from the start, learning to be a kingdom person, being put right oneself and becoming part of God's putting right purposes for the world. And being put right meant taking on board a refreshed vision of what humans were meant to be in the first place, called to reflect the love and wisdom of God into the world. The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus's famous address in Matthew 5, 6, and 7, focuses on Jesus's challenge to his hearers. Jesus was challenging them to a transformation of the heart, making them genuinely loving and forgiving, pure in motive and eager to bring God's powerful, rescuing love into the world. The teachers and preachers of the first generation of Christians developed various lines of practical teaching in relation to areas such as caring for the poor, respect for marriage, social and civic obligations, and so on. But it all flowed from Jesus's kingdom vision of God's plan to set the world right, with his own followers as both agents and models of that New Creation purpose. So belonging, believing, behaving. Throughout history, different Christian groups and movements in very different social and political and cultural settings have emphasized one or the other and interpreted them in different ways. Already in Paul's letters, dated in the 40s and 50s of the first century, we glimpse some who appeared to belong but who seemed not to have got the message about belief and behavior. Paul needed to put them straight. Conversely, some early teachers had to warn against dividing the church, as though believing this or believing that could split you, as though belonging didn't really matter. Such problems, tragically, have persisted to our own day when being a Christian sometimes looks very different in, say, parts of Africa or Southeast Asia to what we find in Europe or North America. This is perhaps inevitable for a worldwide and multicultural movement that is "on the way," all needing to learn from one another what it means to follow Jesus. Because that, after all, is the center of it all. Experiencing the personal presence of Jesus, which the early Christians described in various images, such as Jesus being the vine and we the branches. Or Jesus being the whole body and we ourselves being members, limbs and organs within that body. That personal presence of Jesus, and experiencing his life within us, remains, the living heart flowing out into corporate life, belief, and behavior. Please feel free to click the link to watch the next video in this sequence.