What makes Christianity unique?

Question 60008.

Asking what makes Christianity unique invites a certain kind of answer, the sort that lists our advantages and sounds rather pleased with itself. I want to avoid that, because the things that actually set the gospel apart are not achievements we can be smug about.

Every one of them is something done to us rather than by us. That is precisely the point, and it is where the differences from every other religious system begin.

A God who comes down

Religion, broadly speaking, is the story of human beings reaching upward. Towers, ladders, disciplines, pilgrimages, ritual purity. What makes Christianity unique at the very first step is that the movement runs the other way.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. God did not send a message, a code or a prophet only. He came Himself, and He came as a baby to an occupied province in a stable, which is not how anyone would have designed a divine arrival.

No other faith makes this claim in this form. Hinduism has avatars, appearances of the divine in various forms, but not a permanent union of God and man in one person who keeps His humanity for ever.

A God who suffers

The second thing that makes Christianity unique is a crucified God. In most religious thinking, deity is defined by immunity. Gods do not bleed, and the whole point of being divine is not to be subject to what we are subject to.

Then there is Jesus, tired at a well, weeping at a grave, sweating in a garden, and finally executed by the state. The New Testament does not present this as an embarrassment to be explained. It presents it as the centre.

Paul knew exactly how this sounded, calling it a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, 1 Corinthians 1:23. Nobody invents a religion this way.

Grace is what makes Christianity unique

Ask an adherent of almost any faith how one stands right with God and the answer will involve doing. Keep the pillars, follow the path, obey the law, accumulate the merit. This is the natural religion of the human heart and it appears everywhere.

The gospel says the opposite. To the one who does not work but believes in Him who justifies the ungodly, his faith is counted as righteousness, Romans 4:5. Justifies the ungodly. Not the improving, not the promising, the ungodly.

This is the deepest reason that Christianity unique among the faiths is not a boast. Grace removes the one thing we might have boasted about, and Paul says so explicitly so that no one may boast.

A finished work

Because salvation is accomplished rather than accumulated, it can be finished. Jesus said tetelestai from the cross, a word used on ancient receipts, and the writer to the Hebrews contrasts priests standing daily with a priest who sat down.

Every other system leaves the work open. There is always another observance, another cycle, another life. What makes Christianity unique here is the possibility of assurance, which is not arrogance but the natural response to a completed transaction.

This is why a dying believer can be at peace without having achieved anything impressive. The thief on the cross had no time to improve, and he was told today you will be with me in paradise.

A verifiable event

Most religions rest on private revelations or philosophical insight, which by their nature cannot be checked. Christianity rests on a claim about a public event in a known place under a named governor.

Paul lists witnesses, most of whom were still alive when he wrote, and invites the Corinthians to go and ask them, 1 Corinthians 15:6. He then says that if it did not happen, our preaching is in vain and we are to be pitied.

That willingness to be falsified is unusual, and I take up the historical material in the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. A faith that names its own breaking point is a faith with confidence.

A God who can be known personally

Jesus taught His followers to address God as Father, and Paul says we have received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry Abba, using the Aramaic word a child would use at home, abba.

Compare that with the careful distance most religious systems maintain. Where the divine is impersonal, relationship is a category error. Where the divine is personal but utterly transcendent, intimacy is presumption.

What makes Christianity unique is that the transcendent God invites His creatures into the family without ceasing to be transcendent. Reverence and intimacy live together, which is why our worship should contain both awe and warmth.

A hope that includes the body

Much religious hope is essentially escape, the soul released from matter, the drop returning to the ocean. Christian hope is resurrection, and resurrection means bodies.

Jesus rose bodily, ate fish, showed His hands. Paul says our lowly body will be transformed to be like His glorious body, and Revelation ends with a new heaven and a new earth rather than a disembodied eternity, which I explore in the new heaven and new earth.

That is not a minor detail. It means the material world matters to God, that your body is not a temporary embarrassment, and that grief over death is appropriate rather than a failure of spirituality.

Enemies loved rather than defeated

The ethical distinctive follows from the theological one. God demonstrates His love in that while we were still sinners, Jesus died for us, Romans 5:8, and the church is then told to love its enemies on the same pattern.

Other systems teach kindness, and some teach it beautifully. Loving the people actively trying to destroy you, and praying for them while they do it, is a harder and stranger command, and Jesus modelled it from the cross.

The church has often failed at this spectacularly, which is worth admitting rather than glossing. The standard is not our record. The standard is the one who set it, and our failures are measured against Him rather than against our neighbours.

Holding this without superiority

None of this makes Christians better people. It makes us people who have been given something, and the appropriate posture towards a gift is gratitude rather than swagger.

The moment we treat what makes Christianity unique as a reason to look down on a Muslim colleague or a Hindu neighbour, we have contradicted the grace we claim to have received. Paul asks what we have that we did not receive, and the question has never stopped stinging.

So I hold these distinctives with conviction and, I hope, with an open hand. I set out the wider question in what about other religions.

Written in advance

There is a further distinctive that gets overlooked, which is predictive prophecy. The Old Testament announces events centuries before they occur, naming the birthplace of the Messiah, describing His death in detail in Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53, and giving a timetable in Daniel 9.

God Himself makes this a test of deity, challenging the idols to declare the things to come, that we may know that you are gods, Isaiah 41:23. No other sacred literature stakes its credibility on verifiable prediction in this way, and the scale of it is part of what makes Christianity unique among the world’s faiths.

The obvious reply is that the texts were written afterwards, and it is worth knowing that the Dead Sea Scrolls settled this for Isaiah. A complete scroll of that book was copied before Jesus was born, and the fifty third chapter reads exactly as it does in your Bible.

A community without borders

One more thing sets the gospel apart, and it is sociological rather than doctrinal. From the beginning the church crossed the boundaries that every other ancient religion respected, gathering slaves and owners, Jews and Gentiles, women and men at the same table.

Paul writes that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. In a world organised entirely by such distinctions, that was not a slogan but a scandal, and the pagan critics of the church noticed it and disapproved.

The faith has also proved endlessly translatable, which is another feature that makes Christianity unique. Islam holds that the Qur’an is properly Arabic. The church translated its Scriptures into the language of every people it reached, and that decision has shaped more cultures than any missionary strategy.

So, now what?

Take one of these and let it work on you this week. If grace is really unearned, what would change in how you approach God after a day you are ashamed of?

Then try explaining what makes Christianity unique to somebody in two sentences without using religious vocabulary. It is a harder exercise than it sounds and it will show you what you actually understand.

And check the tone in which you hold it. The gospel that came down to us is not the sort of possession anyone can be superior about. Does your manner match your message?

But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Romans 5:8, ESV