Douglas Jacobsen - The World's Christians

After many years of reflecting on this threefold understanding of God – as Creator, as Christ, and as Holy Spirit (or “Holy Ghost”) – Christians settled on the word “Trinity” to describe their complex understanding of God. Many different theologians over the centuries have tried to explain the three‐ness of God. No single explanation of the Trinity has ever been adopted as the one model that all Christians accept, but almost all Christians continue to ascribe some kind of three‐ness to God. Most Christians describe God as “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” – three divine “persons” bound indissolubly together in one divine being. The notion of God as Trinity sets Christianity apart from the other two Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Islam. In fact, many Jews and Muslims think that Christians have somehow abandoned monotheism for an alternative belief in three separate Gods. Christians themselves maintain that they are indeed monotheists, but they believe that God’s inner being is more complex than can be communicated by simple singularity.

Salvation : Christians assume that the world as it currently exists, and especially the way people currently live, falls short of what God intended for them. In the terminology of the New Testament, this is called “sin” ( harmartia ), a word that literally means “to fall short” or “to miss the mark.” The word “salvation” refers to the act or process by which God overcomes sin, redeeming human beings and giving them the opportunity to become the people they were meant to be.

According to Christian scripture, the most important goal for any person – the goal of the life for which they were created – is to love God “with all your heart and with all your mind and with all your soul.” Salvation accordingly involves the establishment of a proper loving relationship with God. Christians also believe that they are supposed to love others as much as they love themselves, so salvation includes a mandate to establish just and loving relationships among human beings as well. (Obviously Christians do not always live up to this ideal, but most would agree that it is the goal.)

Christians believe that salvation is impossible apart from God’s grace . Grace is God taking the initiative for remaking people into who and what they ought to be. In the language used by many churches, grace is defined as God’s unmerited favor directed toward humanity despite humanity’s sin. Christians believe that God’s grace has been delivered to humanity in many different ways: by way of the Ten Commandments, through the words of the many different prophets who spoke to the ancient Israelite people, and, most crucially, through the birth, teachings, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Grace is also evident in every personal encounter with God that nudges people little by little toward greater love for God and others.

Different communities of Christians have different opinions about some aspects of salvation, including whether human effort is required (or whether God does everything) and how quickly salvation happens (all at once or slowly over time). Despite these differences, all (or almost all) Christians agree that the Christian life includes an ongoing dynamic of confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Christians are instructed to confess their sins (to acknowledge and name their moral failures), they are told to seek forgiveness for these sinful acts from both God and the people they have hurt, and they are encouraged to act in ways that will allow them to be fully reconciled with God and the people they have harmed. Many Christian churches build this dynamic of confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation into their formal religious practices, a process which often involves a priest or pastor acting as one’s “confessor” (a person who hears an individual’s confession of sin and forgives that person in God’s name). Other churches expect individuals to take care of these matters on their own without the help of a priest. Obviously not all Christians follow this practice of self‐examination, confession, and reconciliation with equal rigor, but it is central to the theology of how Christians are supposed to live.

Sacraments : Most Christians believe that God’s grace is uniquely communicated to human beings through specific formal practices of the church; these rituals are typically called sacraments. The two most important Christian sacraments are baptism and the Eucharist. Baptism is the ritual of initiation that marks a person as a follower of Jesus, and it involves either submerging a person in water or pouring water over a person’s head. Baptism is seen as washing away sins committed in the past and as initiating the recipient into a new spiritual life (sometimes called the “new birth”). Some churches baptize babies while others baptize only adults, but baptism in one form or another is practiced by almost all Christians worldwide. Often, it is considered a prerequisite for salvation.

The other major sacrament is the Eucharist, which is also known as Communion, the Lord’s Supper, or Mass. The Eucharist is a symbolic meal that takes place near the end of a Christian worship service. It occurs regularly in most churches and involves eating a small piece of bread and taking a sip of wine (or, in some churches, grape juice). The Eucharist commemorates the last meal that Jesus ate with his disciples, and the bread and wine represent Christ’s body that was broken and his blood that was shed on the cross. Many Christians believe that the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ during the Eucharistic celebration even though they continue to look and taste like bread and wine. The meaning of the ritual of the Eucharist is understood differently by different Christians, but at the least it reminds participants that they are part of a community of mutual care and affection and it is also seen as a form of spiritual sustenance that somehow feeds the soul and empowers individuals to live Christianly.

Christians worldwide share a number of very important beliefs and practices, but there are wide variations regarding how these core convictions of faith are interpreted. Over time, different groups of Christians have developed different shared assumptions about how Christian beliefs should be understood and how Christian practices should be performed. These differing communities of interpretation are called traditions.

The word “tradition” comes from the Latin word traditio , which means “handing down,” and Christian traditions represent different packages of beliefs, practices, and spiritual attitudes and emotions that have been handed down from generation to generation for years and sometimes for centuries. To call something “traditional” implies that it has always been the same, that it is changeless. In reality, traditions are always changing, but generally they change slowly. A religious tradition is like a long, multigenerational conversation in which each new generation adds its own insights and concerns to the mix, sometimes affirming and sometimes critiquing or revising what was done in the past. Over the course of two millennia, Christianity has produced a number of major traditions, each with its own distinct ways of interpreting Christian beliefs, practices, and spiritual affections.

Today four mega‐traditions dominate the Christian landscape, and together they account for roughly 99 percent of all Christians worldwide: Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Pentecostalism (including the Charismatic movement). Roughly half of the world’s Christians are part of the Roman Catholic Church. Protestants and Pentecostal Christians each make up about 20 percent of the global Christian population, and slightly more than 10 percent of the world’s Christians are Orthodox.