What Is Christianity?
Introduction
There is so much to this question. I’m going to tell you a story.
Christianity is one of the world’s great religions, to be sure. But its foundation is based on what it claims are real historical events that happened throughout the history of the world.
So Christianity is in many ways a story. I like to call it God’s story. It is the story of reality. It is also our story.
The story is found in the Bible. The Bible contains 66 books written by some 40 different authors over the course of 1500 years. Yet remarkably, from cover to cover the Bible contains one over-arching story. This is our story, and Christians believe it is actually all true, the same way gravity is true. It goes something like this.
Our Story
When God created the universe and the earth, everything was a perfect paradise. There were no bad things at all, and no evil. There was no sickness, no pain, no violence, not even death. The Bible tells us that at this time, the animals did not even eat each other.
Adam and Eve, the first two human beings that God created, had a wonderful relationship with God. It appears that God would come down to the garden of Eden, where they lived, and walk and talk with them “in the cool of the day.”
God loved them, and all he ever really wanted was for them to love him.
By the way, God still loves everyone to this day, and all he wants is for us to love him too. And each other. But God doesn’t force anyone to love him, does he? Why? Because a forced love is no love at all. Due to the very nature of love, love needs to be a choice.
So God gave all of us a very good but powerful gift: the freedom to choose. And if we choose other than God, he leaves us alone.
Many people struggle over the existence of evil in the world today. Unfortunately, most of the evil in the world (and its consequences) is caused by people who are using their freedom in ways that terribly hurt and harm other people.
Anyway, I guess that Adam and Eve must not have loved God very much because they didn’t want to honor his wishes. He had asked them not to eat the fruit of just one of the trees in the garden. But when they did, they were choosing to take life on their own terms, away from God. That’s when everything changed.
That’s when sin and all of its consequences entered into all of creation, and into Adam and Eve, for the first time. Christianity calls this “the Fall.”
The Fall
I think of it like pouring a tablespoon of red food coloring into the top of a beautiful fish aquarium. The dye will quickly spread and get into everything—the rocks, plants, gravel. Even the fish will take it in. This is how sin contaminated the world. This is when suffering, sickness, disease, viruses, violence, all bad things, including death, came into the world for the first time.
Adam and Eve betrayed God. As a result, they destroyed the amazing relationship they had with him, and they were to leave the garden.
Sin is a corruption of what was previously good. Since Adam and Eve could not pass on what they didn’t have anymore, they passed this corruption of sin onto their children, and eventually on to all of the rest of us. You could say that none of this was any of our fault. But we participate. We all sin, don’t we?
So in a real sense, Adam and Eve ruined everything. God knew what could happen, and he knew what would happen. But it was a chance he was willing to take, because our freedom is that important to him.
Good News, Bad News, Good News
Well, the first good news is that one day God is going to restore everything back to the way it always should have been. There will be a new earth (perhaps the same earth restored), and in fact an all new creation completely free of any corruption of sin. It will be a real, physical, beautiful place where we will live, in our own real physical bodies, restored and incorruptible, forever with God. It’s what the Bible calls heaven.
There will be no sin in heaven; sin won’t be allowed inside. That’s a wonderful thing but at the same time it’s a huge problem for all of us. In our fallen state we are shot through with sin, and there isn’t a thing that we can do to get rid of it on our own.
But the second good news is that we don’t have to. This is why Jesus came—to provide a rescue plan for us from this sin. Because of what he did on the cross, if we ask him to and trust him, he can exchange out our sin for his perfect righteousness so that in the eyes of God, we are without sin.
Theologians call this the Great Exchange.
It means we’re forgiven, and as a result, we can get into heaven.
Sadly (I think), there are those who won’t want to choose God. I think it breaks his heart, but because he loves all of us, he leaves them alone. They’ll be separated from him forever. According to the Bible, we all live forever, and those who choose not to be with God will be in hell instead. That’s going to be a terrible place, without the presence of God, but people in hell will be there because they want to be there.
Well, that’s our story in brief.
Christianity is a worldview that answers all the big questions in life. We have a God who made everything. We understand where we came from and what our problem is. And we know our destiny, depending on how we choose. The entire worldview is grounded in historical events that Christianity claims really happened—events when God supernaturally intervened in history in very real ways.
Faith and Trust
Is Christianity a faith? Well, we hear of the “Christian faith.” But I like to call it a trust. Christianity is a choice to trust, based on good evidence that the story is true. A person is a Christian because they have made a decisive choice to trust Jesus to exchange out their sin, so they can be made right with God.
I’ve briefly touched on worldview and burden of proof in other posts. I’m fully aware that the Christian story makes some incredible claims that require good evidence. But I believe we have powerful evidence that the entire Christian worldview is true. And if it is, it is such good news. For anybody.
Sharing this evidence, and resources to go deeper, is my goal. I’ll do my best, and I sincerely hope you’ll come along.
If you want to hear more about the Christian story in fuller detail, I highly recommend this very readable book:
Greg Koukl, The Story of Reality: How the World Began, How it Ends, and Everything important that Happens in Between (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017). Found on Amazon here.
Awesome!