There is one thing that has always baffled me as a Christian, and that is, how divided Christianity is. What was designed to be a single collective body, working together to the glory of God, is split up into many thousands of sectarian groups and denominations. In many cases, sects do not recognize other sects as belonging to the body at all.
I believe that most division comes from a place of religious pride and spiritual narcissism. Both of these traits create an inability to co-exist with others who don’t look, think, and act like “I” do. We divide over doctrine, some important, most not. We divide over how we worship, how we act, how we dress, how we talk, and more often than most realize, we allow mere words to divide us.
Definitions are very important. It’s been my belief for many years that religious pride rears its ugly head when two people are having a discussion using a word that each define differently. Let’s take a moment to consider the word baptism. Just over half of the world’s professing Christian population believe a baptism involves the sprinkling of water on the head. A little less than half believe that baptism is immersion of the entire body. That difference in practice is hardly reconcilable, yet, should we completely divide from each other over how we have been raised to define that word? Each believer is being “baptized” according to their understanding. If one happens to follow the practice opposite your view, is that person in rebellion or just potentially wrong? And if wrong, does that mean he isn’t part of the body of Christ? At some point as adults, and servants of God, we need to make a decision, are we going to know those who belong to Christ by their fruits, or by their understanding?
There are times when we allow a word to take us into the realm of the absurd. Did you know that there are some people within the faith who, while considering themselves believers and followers of Yeshua (Jesus), will not call themselves a Christian? The reasons vary. In some cases, they view mainstream Christians as having so watered down the Bible, or have become so lukewarm, that they don’t want to be aligned to them as a people group. In other cases, they have a negative view of the word “Christian” itself. This is generally due to their belief that it has a pagan or otherwise questionable origin as a word. I have to ask, is any of that true, or are these people misinformed? I’d like to take a look at this word and see if we can determine how it’s truly defined.
To determine a solid definition of this word, we need only take a 5th grade linguistic approach to the problem. We are simply going to diagram the word itself.
Christ/ian
Do you remember doing this? We have a noun (Christ), and a suffix (ian). Let’s look at them separately and see what definition comes out of the process.
The word Christ is a transliteration of the Greek Christos. Christos is equal to the Hebrew word mashiach. Both words simply mean anointed. So the word Christ means anointed.
The ian ending means, of or belonging to. Some words you are familiar with are pediatrician (one who belongs to the field of pediatrics), optician (one who belongs to the field of optics), musician (one who belongs to the field of music), and historian (one who belongs to the field of history).
If Christ means anointed (and he is The Anointed One to us), and the ian ending means of or belonging to, then being “Christian” simply means that you belong to the Anointed One. That’s it, if you are a Christian, you belong to Christ. What an appropriate, special and even holy thing to be called!
As a Christian, why would we allow the actions of others to get in the way of the blessing of being identified with HIM through that title? Shouldn’t we just stand as a beacon of truth and light, not allowing such pettiness to get between us? And what is pagan about a word that very clearly affiliates us with Christ? I wonder, how many relationships have been destroyed, or feelings hurt, over the division caused through this misunderstanding?
I’d imagine everyone reading this is familiar with Proverbs 6:16-19 which tells us about the 7 things God hates, even considers an abomination. The last thing mentioned is when a brother causes strife or division among other brothers. Often that strife or division stems from disagreeing over things that, in the larger picture, have no bearing on our walk with God at all. And yet, here we are, perhaps 40,000 denominations and sects later. The result of that? We’ve cast a shadow on the light in us that an increasingly dark world desperately needs. As Christians, and I am a Christian, we have to do better, we just have to!
