What is Christianity?
This is an important question because, if we don’t know what Christianity is, we can’t retain it for ourselves nor pass it on to others. Whether you are in a healthy church, a weak church, or are rebuilding from next-to-nothing, you must know what Christianity is. This should be a given. If we don’t know who we are, we will not be able to maintain Christianity ourselves nor pass it on to another generation.
If this is true, we must ask, how do we know what Christianity is? The simple answer is that Christianity is whatever the Bible says it is. The Bible is God’s word to us, and it alone defines Christianity. Ultimately, whether anything is true is determined by whether it matches what the Bible teaches. No person, dead or living, can change what Christianity is. It is what the Bible says it is. Full stop.
But we cannot know what the Bible says without interpreting it. So we must ask, how do we determine what the Bible means? Is every person free to construct a religion based on his or her understanding of the Bible? Is a Christian free to ignore all other voices and consult directly and independently with the Bible? Is Me, My Bible, and the Holy Spirit a valid interpretive method?
This approach ignores a chief obstacle to every person’s interpretation of Scripture — bias. We all have assumptions, preferences, and blind spots which influence our interpretation. The problem is not with Scripture; it is with us. We bring our ideas, experiences, and preferences with us, and these skew our interpretation. Add to this the limitations of our finitude, and it’s clear why we must not interpret Scripture in isolation.
This is one reason God gave us the church. God put us together in community so we can help each other see Scripture more clearly. Other Christians — those whom we know and live with — will help us understand Scripture better. This doesn’t mean that we cannot or should not study the Bible individually, but it should keep us from the illusion that we are free to believe whatever we want. The Christian community restrains our interpretation. It discourages extra-biblical or unbiblical views by subjecting our individual interpretations to a broader perspective. To mitigate bias, Scripture must be interpreted in Christian community.
But I must define what I mean by “Christian community.” I don’t mean any single church, or even a church network. These groups, like individual people, are susceptible to skewed interpretation due to bias. By “Christian community,” I mean more than the local church. I mean the whole body of Christians throughout the last two-thousand years. Christians from history, though they are dead, help us understand Scripture. We are bound to Scripture alone, yet we get at that meaning best in community — both the community of the living and of the dead. In general, the more perspectives are involved, the less likely we are to miss what God is trying to say to us through His word.[1]
To recap, we’ve seen (1) We need to know what Christianity is to experience it ourselves and pass it on to others, (2) Christianity is defined by the Bible, (3) The Bible’s meaning is interpreted by the Christian community, and (4) This Christian community is the whole body of Christians throughout the history of the church. In summary, Christianity is a historic religion. It is not something which we recreate in each generation. Rather, true Christianity is perpetuated by those who recover and retain the essential doctrines which Christians have always believed.
Christianity is a two-thousand-year-old religion. It didn’t start with you, nor with your parents. It didn’t start in 1525 with the founding of the Anabaptist movement. Rather, Christianity started in the 1st century when Jesus founded His church. Its roots go back even further — to the Old Testament, to the writings of Moses, and to creation itself.
We cannot merely reinvent Christianity in our own likeness generation by generation. Christianity is a fixed thing, an objective thing, a propositional, credal, and historic thing. It is not merely creeds, but it is not less than creeds. A person may claim to know and love Jesus, but if his Jesus is not the same one as the church has historically professed and believed, he is an idolater.
I’m not saying that we can only believe doctrines which can be substantiated from church history. Rather, I’m saying that the essence of Christianity has a witness throughout church history. If the core of our faith is something other than what Christians have historically believed, we have in fact created another religion. We are not free to refashion Christianity. It exists as an objective, historic reality, and we must place ourselves within it if we want to truly be Christians.
I’m also not saying that we must hold to everything that Christians have ever taught, as if we need to synthesize the whole history of Christian thought. Rather, I’m saying that we should examine the history of the church to discover which doctrines have been consistently taught. Spiritual vitality requires acquainting ourselves with the primary doctrines which Christians have held for the last two-thousand years.
In an Anabaptist Context
If we Anabaptists don’t know what it means to be a Christian, we will struggle to cultivate vital Christianity in the coming generations — or fail entirely. Yes, Christ Jesus will build His church, but that doesn’t guarantee that we will be a part of it. If we neglect the gospel because we’re distracted by material, cultural, social, or political success, we may realize someday that our children don’t know what it means to be a Christian.
Sometimes I wonder if my contemporaries even know.
I’m not talking about losing our cultural distinctives. Those are valuable, but they aren’t essential. I’m talking about losing the gospel. I’m talking about whether we will maintain the essential beliefs of Christianity, things like God’s triunity, Jesus Christ’s divine and human nature, His atoning death and victorious resurrection, and the Spirit’s work to create and sustain a vital church community.
This takes us immediately to a fundamental question: How do we know what constitutes essential Christian doctrine? Are the beliefs I listed in the previous paragraph just my ideas, or are they based on something more stable?
They have a deliberate historic referent. These doctrines are from The Apostles’ Creed. Though it wasn’t written by the apostles themselves, it summarizes the essence of their teaching. Christians for nearly two-thousand years have recognized this creed as a touchstone of true Christianity. This is more than a person’s opinion. It is a widely accepted definition of some of our essential doctrines.
I’m concerned that many Anabaptists see themselves, not as within a historic Christian religion, but adjacent to it or outside it. For them, Anabaptism is not a part of Christian tradition, but a distinct thing, a reinvention of something lost. One could call this the “Remnant” mindset, the idea that Anabaptism represents the one true expression of Christianity. In this view, faithfulness means being non-Protestant, non-Catholic, and non-Orthodox. True Christianity begins and ends with Anabaptism.
Some Anabaptists are softer, but still elitist. We might call this the “weird cousin” mindset. Christians from other traditions are in the family, but they’re second-rate. They’re close enough to be in the family, but they are certainly not the favorite children. If they really knew their Bibles, if they really loved Jesus, then they would look like us.
Both of these perspectives suffer from a definition of true Christianity which is informed more by our preferences and our practices than by church history. We ought to see ourselves, not as a separate group outside the historic Christian community, but rather as a part of its broad stream. This doesn’t mean losing our identity as a group nor abandoning our distinctives, though it may mean reshaping how we think about the essence of Christianity. It means realizing that Christianity is less about a few particular views or a specific set of applications and more about Christ Himself — and the truths which we must believe and receive in order to know Him.
Jesus is the essence of Christianity, and there are propositional truths concerning Him that Christians have maintained for two-thousand years. We need to place ourselves within that historic stream if we want to experience the same Christ whom Christians have been enjoying for two millenia. Our Anabaptist distinctives are hollow if they don’t flow from a heart rejoicing in God’s grace to us in Christ.
We need to plant our feet firmly in the same ground that Christians have been cultivating for two-thousand years. Our faith is historic, and we need to know that history.
We discover the essence of Christianity by consulting Christians who have been studying the words of Jesus and His apostles ever since they walked on this earth and taught Christian truth. Only the Bible is infallible. Only the Bible gets everything right. Yet Christians have been trying to understand the Bible for a long time, and we need to know what they’ve said. We are not about the business of recreating Christianity. It already exists. If we have it, we need to maintain it. If we don’t, we need to recover it. In either case, the witness of the dead is essential to vital faith.
This is how the early Anabaptists thought, a point I will try to demonstrate next.
Anabaptists and Historical Theology
The primal Anabaptists were not trying to reinvent Christianity in their own likeness. There was far more going on than a simple back-to-the-Bible movement. They were Bible-purists, yet they maintained their historical referent. They were educated not only in the biblical languages and biblical text, but also in the history of Christian thought. Anabaptism was a retrieval movement, not reinventing Christianity or discovering something which had never been believed before. They not only argued from Scripture but also from church leaders.
A few examples will help demonstrate this. Menno Simons (by all accounts the most prolific Anabaptist) accepts the doctrines taught in the Apostles’ Creed as his own. Describing himself and fellow Anabaptists, he says, “We who are grains in one loaf agree not only as to the Twelve Articles (the Apostles’ Creed)…but also as to all the articles of the Scriptures…”[2] He didn’t restrict himself to this creed, but he did accept it as an essential starting point.
Menno was not looking for something different from historic Christianity. He wanted to maintain the best of historic Christian doctrine, while simultaneously amending the places where it had gone wrong. He felt free to disagree with Augustine, Origin, Jerome, and Lactantius regarding padobaptism.[3] Yet other times he quotes these men favorably, along with Athanasius, Tertullian, Anselm, Gregory, and Cyril. Menno also uses historic councils of Nicaea and Carthage to support his views.
Another example. Balthazar Hubmaier followed the Apostles’ Creed in a lengthy prayer he wrote while imprisoned for his Anabaptist views. And in arguing for believers’ baptism, he quotes successively from Origin, Basil the Great, Athanasius, Tertullian, Jerome, Cyril, Theophylact, and Eusebius to support his views. Other parts of his work show that he was familiar with many writers throughout church history.
He, like Menno, did not allow them to overshadow Scripture: “In all divisive questions and controversies only Scripture, canonized and sanctified by God Himself, should and must be the judge, no one else.”[4] Yet he recognized their importance to rightly understanding the doctrines revealed in Scripture.
A third example. Pilgram Marpeck, in describing the Christian practice of communion, follows Heinrich Bullinger’s use of Clement, Augustine, and Tertullian. He also references Cyprian, Pliny, Irenaeus, Eusebius, Ambrose, and Augustine.
Two things are clear in all three of these cases: (1) the Anabaptists were familiar with the main figures of Christian history, and (2) they considered their views important (though not final) in their search for pure Christianity.
I’m not enough of an early Anabaptist scholar to say whether these two things are present across the spectrum of Anabaptists. Then again, few things were. I will say, however, that I believe they are represented in the best of Anabaptism, the form which I would like to emulate, and which I would like to see us recover. In my opinion, the Anabaptist church was at its best when it was intentionally historic and thoroughly biblical. The heart of Anabaptism is not separation as an end to itself, but purity in doctrine and in life, which led to separation — often forced upon them by an established church which was unwilling to change.
The early Anabaptists saw themselves as within the historic Christian stream, and were willing — even eager — to cite bishops, theologians, and commentators from throughout church history to support their views. We should likewise locate ourselves within this historic stream of faith.
To be as plain as possible — these early Anabaptists did not see themselves as outside the historic Christian faith. Rather, they put themselves squarely within that stream, not slavishly, but recognizing that Christianity has a pedigree, one which they wanted to maintain. The Anabaptists were, in many respects, Protestant, though they went further in their restoration efforts, willing to depart from the established church in hopes of creating a pure community of believers committed to following Scripture wherever it led.
At the heart of the Anabaptist movement was the desire for a pure biblicism, which they pursued, not by rejecting all other voices, but in quite the opposite way by inquiring of past generations to inform, shape, and support their own beliefs.
This is in contrast to the mindset of some in our conservative Anabaptist circles that, in order to be pure, we must distance ourselves from other Christian traditions, and even distance ourselves from historic articulations of Christian doctrine. While few among us would expressly denounce a history-rich Christianity, it seems that many are trying to either maintain a relatively modern view of Christianity or to reinvent it from scratch. In the process, they lose much of what Christianity has historically entailed.
Looking Back
I’m not for dead academic pursuits or worthless historical trivia. However, I want to be a part of building the true church, which exists on only one foundation — Christ. There is no other foundation. This foundation is revealed in Scripture, but it must be understood by Christians for us to build on it. We should not expect to build on the same structure if we are ignorant of the core tenets which Christians have always tried to maintain. We must hold the same doctrine if we want to build the same church.
I’m not trying to say that we all need to study the early church fathers in order to be faithful Christians. Rather, I’m saying that we need to be familiar with the essential teachings, especially regarding God’s nature, character, and works. And this isn’t about perusing the archives and pulling out only those things which tickle our fancies. Rather, it’s about recovering the things which Christians have always believed are essential.
The early creeds are a great place to start. The Apostles’ Creed, which I referenced earlier, is a crisp summary of essential trinitarian theology, paired with affirmations of Christ’s deity, redemptive work, session at the Father’s right hand, and imminent return, and of the Spirit’s effectual work building and unifying the Christian community. It is historically rooted, emphasizing that Christianity requires actual events in time-and-space history such as Jesus’ virgin birth, His trial and crucifixion under Pontius Pilate, and His death and resurrection. It is a valuable thumbnail sketch of some of the truths at the heart of Christianity.
The various creeds coming out of the early councils (Nicea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon) solidified essential doctrines regarding Trinitarian theology, and especially Christology. These are by no means total belief systems like are represented in later confessions of faith. However, they describe the core of Christianity. It is helpful for us to be aware of these councils, their conclusions, and their continuing relevance to our day.
Though we ought to maintain our distinctives, we should see ourselves as within the main stream of historic Christianity, not outside it. This starts by realizing what historic Christianity entails. It may be less — and more — than you think.
Moving Forward
Having ventured to speak my mind about the past, I would like to say a few things about our present moment, too. I think having a historically rich view of Christianity helps us (1) live humbly and (2) think proportionally.
On the first, we would go a long way in the right direction if we stopped thinking that the church begins and ends with the Anabaptists. We did not invent Christianity, nor did we discover it singlehandedly. Rather, the Anabaptists were a part of a larger retrieval movement. I think we did better and went further than most, yet we ought to recognize that the Anabaptist project was not fundamentally different from Protestantism. Both were trying to retrieve historic Christianity. Both respected the witness of the believing dead. Anabaptists were more committed to purity, and therefore were more radical and more persecuted. And yet the commitment shared with other Protestants should keep us from looking down our respective noses at others who come out differently than we do. Realizing that we are a part of a broader Christian stream — one that has existed for around two-thousand years — ought to keep us from scorning other believers who are trying to walk the same path.
Second, having a historically rich view of Christianity helps us think proportionately because it reminds us of what is really at the heart of Christianity. While all truth is important, some truths are essential. And these truths should be prioritized. What we believe about God, about Christ, about the Spirit, and about salvation are much closer to the heart of Christianity than many of the things we tend to occupy ourselves with. Too often we put 90% of our energy into the 10% of beliefs that distinguish us from other Christians. Though we should continue to teach and practice our distinctives (inasmuch as they are biblical), we must keep them in their proper proportion. Yes, let’s maintain the uniqueness of our movement, but not at the expense of our Christianity. We have often put an inordinate amount of effort into maintaining our distinctiveness while putting relatively little effort into retaining the heart of Christian doctrine.
Conclusion
Christianity is a historic religion. It exists as a consistent, objective set of truth claims which have been held by Christ-followers for two millenia. We must know where we came from in order to maintain fidelity in the future. The early Anabaptists are models we can follow in our own search for historic Christianity. They not only knew their Bibles, they knew their history. Let us not just retrieve their views; let’s also retrieve their approach to recovering pure and essential Christianity.
[1] Though the truth is not always found in the majority. Athanasius stood nearly alone against a Christian world which was willing to deny that God the Son was eternal.
[2] Menno Simons, The Complete Writings of Menno Simons, trans. Leonard Verduin, edit. J. C. Wenger, 761. Parentheses mine.
[3] Infant baptism.
[4] Balthesar Hubmaier, Bathasar Hubmaier, theologian of Anabaptism, trans. and edit. By H. Wayne Pipkin and John H. Yoder, 23.
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