It's beginning to look at lot like...Christmas?

I’m all for putting the Christ back in Christmas, but I suspect that we’re first going to have to figure out how to put the Christ back in Christian. George W. Bush is the most glaring example of a growing number who label themselves “Christian” but behave in ways that are, to say the least, antithetical to anything we know about the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. You don’t have to have a seminary degree to know that followers of “the way” weren’t always called Christians. Indeed, little groups of highly factionalized first-century Jews were the first to accept Jesus as the Messiah, but there were many such groups, each with its own messiah. It really wasn’t until the movement spread to the Greco-Roman world that the term Christian was coined, literally meaning “little Christ”. Those familiar with the Christian New Testament know that one of the first real debates in the fledgling religion centered upon whether or not one must first be a Jew in order to authentically claim Jesus as the Messiah, and it was Paul that championed Gentile eligibility. As the early church eventually assimilated non-Judeo cultures, “Christian” became the accepted identifier. I delve into this trivia because of the recent shootings in Colorado, where an armed security guard accepted responsibility for having shot the gunman before it was finally determined that he actually had committed suicide. Armed guards at churches? I’m quite sure that the Las Vegas media were not the only ones asking whether or not this should be the new face of “church” in the wake of the killings. What would Jesus do? The fundamentalists get off easy on this one, because there were no guns in Jesus’ time. But for those of us condemned to think, it taxes our understanding of the Christ to conclude that Jesus would condone such resolution to what appears to be a growing problem in today’s world.