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Two years ago, I went to a seminar about Peace Feasts, which aim to bring Christians and Muslims together for interfaith conversations. One of the get-to-know-you questions that was brought up was, “What’s something you wish people knew about your religion?”
Oftentimes, we think we know what Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus or Bahá’ís believe because we’ve absorbed information here and there, sometimes on purpose and sometimes not. However, the ideas we have about these belief systems aren’t always accurate.
I follow Jesus, and nowadays as in biblical times (for example, see John 10:19-21), there are a lot of misunderstandings about him and the movement he set in motion.
It’s not about becoming a better person so that you get into heaven
In my experience, this is the most common misconception I encounter about my faith. If you read no other part of this column, please read this.
There’s this idea that good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell, so you need to do things like go to church, pray and avoid doing bad things. If you do these things, you count as one of the good people and get to go to heaven.
That’s not what biblical Christianity says.
Biblical Christianity says that all humans sin against God (to paraphrase the concept of original sin), and the penalty is death (see Romans 6:23). If all of us sin — via things like lying, murder, perverting justice by taking bribes — then we all deserve death.
Only a non-guilty person can take on someone else’s guilt, which is what Jesus did for those who trust him. Before a person puts their faith in Jesus, the Bible describes them as spiritually dead (see Ephesians 2:1), and what’s dead can’t make itself alive by volunteering at a soup kitchen.
Christians believe that it is by repenting of our rebellion and trusting that Jesus took the penalty we deserve that a person gets to go to heaven. That’ll change your life but notice the order of operation. Faith comes first, life changes follow.
The difference between this and the concept of “do good things so that you get into heaven” is motivation. As pastor Timothy Keller put it, there's a difference between obeying God so that you can be accepted by him, and obeying God because you’ve already been accepted by him through Jesus.
Christianity is about the second, not the first. Getting it mixed up leads to a work-based mindset that can’t save you. Christians say that it’s only by the grace of God that anybody gets saved (see Ephesians 2:8-9).
That’s not behavior modification, that’s change of heart.
Christianity isn’t just a white, Western religion
How could it be? Christians follow Jesus, a Jewish man who lived and died in what we now know as the Middle East. He commanded his followers to make disciples of all nations.
Rebecca McLaughlin, in chapter two of her excellent book “Confronting Christianity: 12 Questions for the World’s Largest Religion,” points out that the founding of the Ethiopian Church precedes Rome’s Christianization and cites Yale professor Stephen Carter’s assertion that “around the globe, the people most likely to be Christians are women of color.”
She continues outlining the Church’s multiethnic history and present, from the Middle East, where “Iraq is home to one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world” to Asia, where Christianity was introduced to India hundreds of years before it was to the British Isles and China, according to cautious estimates, had over 68 million Christians as of 2010.
You can sum it up as McLaughlin does, by stating that “most of the world’s Christians are neither white nor Western, and Christianity is getting less white Western by the day.” This diversity is beautiful. It helps the church to reflect God well, as every single person is made in his image, no matter what they look like.
Christians are meant to be humble because we know we’re not perfect
I haven’t seen much of "The Office" but even I know that Angela, at least in the first few seasons, is portrayed as a self-righteous Christian hypocrite. It seems to me that many people think of Christians that way. And on the one hand, they’re right.
We’re not the same people that we were before Jesus, but we still fail to live in a way that fully reflects the magnitude of God’s love for us and for the people around us. I’d hope that we would be the first to admit that — after all, sin is why we need a savior.
This knowledge should eliminate all traces of haughtiness. I say it should eliminate arrogance, because we often forget. We downplay the lying, the cheating and the stealing that we’ve perpetrated and look down on those who are doing what we used to. It’s part cover-up, part amnesia, and all un-Christlike.
Jesus didn’t hesitate to call a spade a spade, but neither was he arrogant. He didn’t have that holier-than-thou attitude that makes people call Christians stuck-up, even though he is literally holier than thou.
Those of us who follow him are trying to look more like him, so if your friendly neighborhood Christian is failing to be humble, that’s on them, not Jesus.
There’s a saying that “the ground is level at the foot of the cross.” What does that mean? That the “good girl” from your fifth-grade Catechism class needs God’s mercy just as much as the gang member serving a life sentence in jail.
The point is that no one is perfect. Christians especially should recognize this and have mercy on others’ imperfections, as God has had mercy on ours.
Sydney Weber (she/her) is a first-year master's student studying second language studies.
