What are Christians?

At the center of our faith is a story.

Christians are believers in God—one God, supremely good, who created all that exists, including us, and who cares for all creation unfailingly. What makes Christians unique is that we identify this one God with a human person who lived and died: Jesus of Nazareth, a first-century Palestinian Jew. Jesus healed sick people, gathered a circle of his followers (Jewish like him), and taught people how best to love God and other people. Jesus was brought up on charges of political subversion and executed by the Roman authorities who occupied his homeland.

If this were all there was to it, Jesus might be an interesting historical figure and not much more. But Christians also believe that on the third day after his death, Jesus rose from the dead and appeared again to his closest followers. For these followers, Jesus’s resurrection confirmed not only that Jesus’s message and teachings were true, but also that Jesus was God’s own chosen, or “anointed.” In Greek, the language of the Christian scriptures, the word for “anointed” was christos … and so Jesus came to be called Christ. Eventually, Jesus was recognized not just as God’s messenger, but as God in human form—both human and divine. This is the heart of Christian teaching about Jesus: that God, the all-powerful creator of the universe, loved human beings so much that God became one of us.

Whole libraries have been filled with books about Jesus and about Christianity. But the most basic thing to know is this: Jesus, who was at once both God and a human being, taught a way of love, and he died and rose again “for us and for our salvation”—in the words of the Nicene Creed, one of the oldest expressions of Christian faith. What exactly is meant by Jesus saving us is a complex subject, and Christians down the centuries have proposed many different answers. But they share the common conviction that Jesus, by his life and death, opened up the possibility of new life for all people.