Where Everybody's Crazy

While I'm being contentious, here's something I've been thinking about for a couple of days as a result of a Usenet discussion. What is a Christian? I've come to believe that's actually the wrong question. It is, to be sure, only a very recent question, one which has occupied only the past, say, 10% of the Church's life, and so, since it's very new, and since it's a wildly different category of question to the ones we're used to answering, as a Church we don't really have a very good answer yet. The answers that we do have seem to start "someone who accepts" or "someone who believes", which rather reduces Christianity to a set of dogma, a bunch of formal propositions to be accepted. This doesn't look anything like the informal way in which Jesus banded his followers together, and how they continued to operate after he ascended. (Perhaps a better definition, if we have to have one, would start "someone who has been transformed" or "someone who has been met". But we like verifiability, so that probably wouldn't fly.)

The reason why it's such a confusing and unconventional question is because Christians throughout the ages saw themselves as members of a different race, citizens of a different nation, the Kingdom of Heaven. To ask what made them Christian, without reference to their nation, would be a meaningless question. This even continued for the first couple of hundred years after the Reformation. A Christian cannot be separated from the community of faith. It's only when our thinking became individualised that our faith became more and more individualised and reducable to doctrinal principles of faith. (I'm talking in broad sweeps here, there are always one or two individuals throughout a historical movement that are thinking totally outside the box.) What makes me an Englishman? My membership of the set of "English people". What makes me a Christian? My membership of the Church.

Over time this new nation had to circumscribe limits of behaviour for its members. When problems arose within the community, the community got together to decide what was and wasn't acceptable. From this we get the body of the Councils and Canon Law. As far as I'm concerned, whether or not they got it all right or not is irrelevant. They decided on who is and who is not part of the Church. You have to have boundaries. The important thing to realise is that these boundaries were not defining the faith; they were defining the community. The Catholic problem is that is assumes that the faith and the community are entirely the same - but Jesus has sheep who are not of this fold. The Evangelical problem is that it assumes that the faith and the community are entirely separate - but Jesus did not call people into mental assent of propositions, but into a transformed community which seeks to follow his example.