I did not know for a long time that Christianity didn’t start out as a new religion. The original Christians were Jews and they understood themselves to continue to be Jews. What set them apart from other Jews was that they believe that Jesus was the Messiah that had been promised in the Hebrew Bible. Early Christianity was considered to be so deeply rooted in Judaism that when non-Jewish people converted to “Christianity”, the leaders of the church at the time understood that they were becoming Jewish (see Rom. 2:29), not Christian!
Similarly, Saint Paul is considered by many as the “inventor” of Christianity (or at least Christian theology). This is odd in the sense that Paul himself didn’t seem to think of it this way as far as we can tell from his writings. Paul understood himself to continue to be deeply Jewish even after his confession of faith in Jesus as the Messiah. By believing in Jesus, Paul believed that he was the truest form of a Jew because belief in Jesus meant fulfilling God’s long-awaited promises to Israel for a new covenant.
“Christianity” in the early church was considered so Jewish that it’s not even until the tenth chapter of the fifth book of the New Testament (Acts 10) that the early believers come to the realization that this Jewish Messiah and his redemptive death and resurrection isn’t exclusively for Jews! Even when God reveals to Saint Peter that God is permitting Gentiles to access salvation and forgiveness of sins through faith in Jesus, Peter doesn’t believe it. God has to show him and tell him three times in a row until Peter finally gets it (Acts 10:15–16). After Peter finally concedes that Gentiles are allowed to be members of the Jewish family, he has to see it for himself to really internalize this new reality.
Peter has a hard time with this. For millennia there were distinctions between “us”, and “them”. They are unclean. We are clean. They are defiled. We are holy. In fact, the very Jewish existence, in many ways, manifests out of not being Gentiles! To be Jewish meant that there was a difference between us and them! What does it mean to be Jewish if the dividing line is erased?! These ideas rocked Peter’s world.
The interesting thing is that even in Christianity, there is still an “us” and “them”, but it’s no longer an ethnic line (i.e., Jew and Gentile). What distinguishes between “us” and “them” is faith. There are those who believe in Jesus (and obey him) and those who don’t believe in him (and disobey him).
It’s not race, it’s not gender, it’s not socio-economics, it’s not nationality, attractiveness, eye colour, height, intelligence, or athletic ability. It. Is. Faith.
All this means that group identity politics and philosophy far from Christian. It is not your ethnic group, gender group, or sexual-orientation group that will sit before the judgment seat when the time comes; it is the individual. It is not a group that died on the cross; it is an individual. When we face judgment, the question God asks is not concerning your relationship to your group. The question is, “Did you obey?”, not, “What group are you a part of?”
In this way, Christianity is inclusive, yet exclusive. It is inclusive in the sense that salvation is available to all people. It is exclusive in that only those who believe in Jesus can be saved.
