An Interpretation of Christianity

I believe Christianity to be the best of all religions. I also believe it to be the best of all beliefs about the world and what may lie beyond it. And I believe that it provides the best way of living of all.

Why do I think this? Well, Jesus says that we are known by our fruits, and Christianity has an impressive record. It is a mixture of Indo-European tradition, to which Hinduism and Buddhism belong, and Semitic tradition, from which spring Judaism and Islam. It began in the East, but has become the characteristic religion of the West. It did this by first wedding together Jews and Greeks, then it went out to the Romans, and from there to the world. It is the largest religion in terms of numbers, and its adherents are found in every country. They have quite often lived good lives, and sometimes wonderful ones, and they have created much of the greatest art. They have again and again been willing to die for what they believe. Over 2000 years, this religion has shown an astonishing ability to change and to grow, from the first desperate moments after our hero died on the Cross to the challenges of the present age of atheism.

But sometimes I can go further than believing Christianity to be simply the best of religions, to believing that it is the truth itself. This mainly happens to me when I read about the life and death of Christ and am so impressed that I believe that this man can have been no one but God. The impression sometimes dies, but it always returns, often when he sends one of his mysterious signs. Then he seems to me the embodiment of perfect love, which I believe to be the animating spirit of the entire universe. Of course, I cannot prove it, but I believe the latter intuition is shared in some form by all human beings. I often cannot show much love myself, and in order to feel it I need to follow Christ.

I make a clear distinction between what is absolutely essential to my religion and what can safely be left as an area of doubt. I believe the essentials, for me, to consist of the feelings about Jesus that I have described, four doctrines, and a system of morality that is both simple and complex.

The four doctrines are: the Atonement (what we might call, more simply, the Cross); the Incarnation (the idea that Jesus is both God and human being); the Resurrection (the belief that he rose again from the dead, and that we will too); and the Trinity (the assertion that the nature of God, like our own natures, and the nature of the universe, is both one and three).

So where does the number two come in? Well, that’s in what Jesus says about love and morality. He says that the whole of the law can be summed up in two commandments, to love God with everything we’ve got, and to love other people as we love ourselves. Oh, yes, but here we immediately run into a difficulty. How can we Christians claim to be the religion of love when it is so obvious to so many people that we lack it?

When we get to the tricky details of how our love can be applied, we have many sources, of which the most consistently relevant must surely be our own experience, but we also have the wonderful Bible, and especially the four Gospels. Why are these so important? Because they are almost our only direct record for what Jesus himself was like.

They are rather mysterious documents. Despite endless detailed research since Baruch Spinoza began the process in 1670, no one has ever been able to establish exactly when, where or by whom they were written. How much they incorporate of the actual words of Jesus, and how many of the events described there actually happened, we shall perhaps never know. They bear the clear imprint of four violent and opposed personalities. But from these four accounts, written in simple Greek, and by men who may have been largely uneducated, there rises a vision of love, suffering and self-sacrifice that has never been surpassed.

Particularly important, in my view, for understanding the complexity of the morality that is being taught is the sequence from Chapter 15 to Chapter 19 of the Gospel of Luke, where the many difficulties and opportunities of life, and the extent of its necessary compromises, are explored by a superb writer about Jesus who was also, we believe, a doctor, and who knew the world.

The significance of the whole Bible is the most contentious and difficult of all the issues that have divided Christians over the centuries. C.S. Lewis, in his masterful work Mere Christianity, sheds eirenic light on almost every troubling thought, but about the Bible he simply says that we must return to it as often as possible. And, if we do that, we shall certainly come to identify with one of the varied figures contained therein—the limping and crafty Jacob, perhaps, or his son the super-competent and emotionally-lacking grass Joseph, or the despairing but hopeful preacher Ecclesiastes, and many women with the intelligent and tender Moabitess Ruth getting her man, and even more men with the rough, bumbling yet ultimately triumphant fisherman Peter —and we will find a part of our salvation in knowing ourselves in these pages. As a wise old Catholic priest once said to me, the Bible is as God wants it to be.

The question also rises, and has caused much controversy, of how Jesus views the many groups that make up our world. He seems originally to have believed that his message was to the Jews, but come to understand that it was to the Gentiles also. He emphasised the poor, but offered some hope to the rich. He has been criticised for not trying to promote a fairer balance between the sexes on the political level, as Mohammed did, but if his apostles were all men, his leading disciples were mainly women. He loved children. On the subject of homosexuals, he is silent, but, for what it is worth, he is recorded as having had not a wife but a beloved disciple. The implication of all his teaching is that he makes no distinctions on grounds of race. He healed the sick. He said that some of his sheep were not of this fold. He offers no teaching on the rights of animals, but he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. A love of plants is inherent in all human beings, so he must feel it too. And, as for inanimate things, his great disciple St Francis spoke of Brother Sun and Sister Moon.

Besides the four doctrines that I have mentioned, and some others, such as the Virgin Birth, that I leave aside, because their relevance is unclear to me, there are two that are obviously very important, Original Sin and the Last Judgment. And since the perfect number in Christianity, at least since St Bonaventure (really since the Gospel of John) has been seven, we must look for a seventh doctrine, or area of thought, to discuss, and I think this would be the position of the church. At least in the Gospel of Matthew, and less clearly in Mark, the church was founded by Christ himself, then the Spirit comes down at Pentecost, and in the Acts we see the Jerusalem disciples holding all goods in common. Protestants, perhaps slightly imperfectly following this tradition, tend to stress that one must belong to a definite local church and thus experience all the warmth of community. Catholics, in contrast, say that the church is the very body of Christ continuing to exist in the world, something that is occasionally difficult to believe in their persons. Nevertheless the vocation of a solitary is one that is fraught with every sort of danger for a Christian. And worse apart possibly than together. Perhaps I had better leave this difficult topic with those remarks alone.

Now for the two important but forbidding doctrines. The first of them, Original Sin, mainly means, in my slightly terrified opinion, that all human beings have an inbuilt tendency to do wrong, and that we must rely on His help to save us from this without entirely neglecting our own efforts. The second, the Last Judgment, is the most controversial of all Christian doctrines. Modern minds have particular difficulty with it, just as in the past it tended to be cause for especial rejoicing. John Gray has even argued recently that the whole concept of life as a linear process ending in a final judgment is inherently evil. And, certainly, the joy of Christianity has always been diluted by the belief, shared by the great majority of Christians at all times, and rather more characteristic of Protestants than of Catholics or Orthodox, that some human beings are destined for eternal bliss and that others will be excluded.

But there has always been a minority view that the salvation of Jesus Christ is for all. This belief is called Universalism. It is suggested, or foreshadowed, although very occasionally, in what we have recorded of the sayings of Christ, for instance in the sixteenth verse of the sixteenth chapter of Luke’s Gospel, or in the sixteenth verse of the tenth chapter of John’s. It is also sometimes hinted at by Christ’s rather fractious although often inspirational disciple St Paul and by other New Testament writers. In the third century, Universalism was expounded by the brilliant theologian Origen, who introduced the idea that human beings will suffer some punishment after death before they eventually reach heaven. In more recent times, the doctrine has been associated with the Christian heresy of Unitarianism, the belief that there is no Trinity.

But while Universalism has never been widely accepted, neither has it ever been condemned by the church. In recent times, as thinking has become consistently more liberal in the West, it has been gaining much ground, and more liberated spirits have even once again begun to question whether the element of restoration for wrongdoing not paid for in this world, which suggests itself so insistently to our wounded sense of justice, might possibly be provided in the form of reincarnation This would bring Christianity firmly into line with the wisdom of the East, from which our religion ultimately derives, and which is embodied in so many and fascinating traditions, only one of the many benefits of the idea. Universalism is my own personal hope, not more than that, because we cannot know the mind of God.

This is my interpretation of the Christian faith and of the whole meaning of life. It may perhaps strike you as brief, simple and a little rough-and-ready. It is certainly only an interpretation. But it is enough for me, and I intend to hold to it until death. Whether it will commend itself to you is another question.

C.A.R. Hills’s prison memoir appeared in the January-February issue.