Christ the Misunderstood

When we try to define something, we must first single out its unique features, rather than those it shares with many other things.

A tricycle resembles a plane in that they are both made of metal, transport people and have three wheels. However, someone offering that explanation to a visiting alien, without mentioning that planes fly, wouldn’t be almost right or half-right. He’d be mad.

Yet it’s astounding how many intelligent people ignore this simple logical trick when trying to get their heads around Christianity. An epistolary exchange between Nancy Mitford and her good friend Evelyn Waugh is quite telling in that regard.

“How can you behave so badly – and you a Catholic!” wrote Mitford. “You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic,” Waugh replied. “Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.”

Waugh’s riposte was a good answer to a bad question. For Mitford’s remark shows a woeful misunderstanding common to most intelligent atheists. Above all, she expected Christianity to make its communicants morally better. And if that manifestly didn’t work, it was the religion she blamed, not the communicant.

Christianity may indeed have a meliorating effect on some people, but that’s not what it’s about. There does exist such a thing as Christian (or Judaeo-Christian) morality, but it’s corollary to the faith’s essence, not the essence itself.

A greater writer than Mitford, Tolstoy, based his whole philosophy on the same mistake, reducing Christianity to its moral teaching or, even narrower, just the Sermon on the Mount. This made him perhaps the world’s most influential thinker in the first decade of the 20^th century, because that’s what the world wanted to hear. But a solid intellectual structure can’t be built on the wobbly foundation of a conceptual error.

Tolstoy’s falsification of Christianity made him “the mirror of the Russian revolution”, in Lenin’s phrase. It also made him talk nonsense on a vast range of subjects – half of the 50 volumes he left behind are taken up with essays, with nary a sound thought anywhere (for details, see my book God and Man According to Tolstoy, if you can find it).

The morality of our religion is called Judaeo-Christian because the Decalogue is an essential part of the Christian canon. Jesus merely added a few touches to the Ten Commandments: “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I tell you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.”

For most neophytes and non-believers the morality of loving one’s enemy presents a stumbling block. If asked to identify the unique feature of Christian morality – or, for that matter, of Christianity – this is the one they mention first.

That’s as if a tricycle has just soared up in the air and flown to a faraway destination. For there is nothing about that commandment that is uniquely Christian.

For example, try to identify this dictum: “He who has done evil unto thee, repay him with good.” Sounds just like Matthew 5:44, doesn’t it? Yet this pre-Christian Beatitude was written in Sumerian cuneiform some 2,000 years before Christ.

Many ancient religions and moral codes contained commandments identical to Judaeo-Christian ones. Thus the Babylonian king, Hammurabi, wrote this in the 18^th century BC: “The strong shall not injure the weak.”

And the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl instructed his adherents in the same Christian vein: “Dress the naked, feed the hungry; remember that their flesh is even like thy flesh, that they are such as even thou art; love the weak because he too is in God’s image.”

In fact, the longer we look at the religious thought that either preceded Christianity or developed concurrently with it, the more similar elements we’ll find.

In common with Buddhism, Christianity accepted that man is sinful (though not originally created that way).

In common with Platonism it postulated an ideal world beyond our earthly reach.

In common with Judaism it saw the world as the creation of one God.

In common with Philo (roughly Jesus’s contemporary) and other Hellenised Jews of Alexandria it defined Logos as God’s creative force. In fact long before John’s Gospel, Plato and the Jewish Platonists of Egypt used the word Logos to describe a self-differentiating divine unity, giving Gibbon an opening for one of his many anti-Christian jibes (to the effect that St John’s revelation had been taught in Alexandria four hundred years before it was written down).

If it were possible to reduce Christianity to its morality, we could still be worshiping An the Sumerian, Marduk the Babylonian or Quetzalcoatl the Mexican. Yet if we obstinately insist on forgoing an ancient temple for a church, we must do so in the full knowledge that, however important Christian morality is, it’s not what we worship.

The only aspect of Christianity that is unquestionably unique to it is the person of Jesus Christ, Logos made flesh, a triune God whose one hypostasis became man, accepted death to redeem the sins of the world, resurrected on the third day and showed a path to life everlasting.

If you read the Nicaean Creed, that’s what Christianity is. Nothing more, nothing less. The rest is commentary, in Rabbi Hillel’s phrase.

Courtesy of Tolstoy and other falsifiers, the word ‘Christian’ has expanded its meaning so much that it burst at the seams. People began to use it in the meaning of ‘good person’, which is a harmful solecism.

A Christian may or may not be a good person, and a good person may or may not be a Christian. A tricycle doesn’t fly, a child doesn’t pedal an airliner, and a Christian is someone who believes – and venerates – every word of the Creeds. What’s there not to understand?