By STEPHEN Tucker
When I was young, I attended a small parochial school in Central Texas for my grade school years. It was a two-room, two-teacher school with likely less than 40 students total. Out of those 40 students were three named Stephen.
To keep us all answering to a unique name, our school leader dubbed the oldest Stephen, the next oldest (only about three months older than me) Steve, and me, the youngest Stevie. I HATED that name. More specifically, I HATED that label. Little Stevie Tucker.
Now truth be told both of my grandmothers used that name for me well into my teenage years. But that was different. They had inherent permission to do so. To everyone else then and up until I went off to college where the class register told the professors I was Stephen, I was Steve.
Labels. Those things once just words that now have become pregnant with meaning. It was not lost on my friend Steve Wilson or frankly everyone else in the school what Stevie stood for. The little guy. The youngest. The last in line.
It was a label definition that found me and my beloved friend Don Shafer arguing intensely while driving to a high school reunion event a few years ago. Bart Ehrman, prominent New Testament scholar, was the focus of our debate. I staunchly defended that Ehrman was a Christian while Don adamantly dug in that to be a Christian one couldn’t just follow the teachings of Christ, one had to affirm that Jesus was divine. To Don, the label of Christian could not expand to following the teaching of Christ. It had to be owned only by those who also believed in an immaculate conception, sinless life, death as a transferable ticket to a second life. Don’s not wrong in his perception of what is important to Christians. According to Pew Research, 92 percent of Christians believe in heaven. (“Views on the afterlife among U.S. adults”). Most, it would seem but without specific data to support, believe in acceptance of Jesus as their “savior” as the pathway for them to get to heaven. Being a Christian, to them, has a rather substantial reward attached to it.
Which sort of begs the question …
“How many Christians would be Christian if there was no reward connected to it?”
While Don and I debated Ehrman, Thomas Jefferson today is likely the most maligned non-deist Christian. Jefferson often gets brought up as “not a Christian” when in fact he went to great lengths to compile Jesus’ teachings into what is now known as The Jefferson Bible for the purpose of studying and reading from them. According to a 2020 Smithsonian Magazine article outlining the history of America's anxiety over The Jefferson Bible, “Jefferson, who had suffered great criticism for his religious beliefs, once said that the care he had taken to reduce the Gospels to their core message should prove that he was in fact, a 'real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.'”
I should have just quoted that to Don. Jefferson was a Christian for no reason other than the ethos it brought to his moral fabric and his leadership. And that begs the second question,
“Who's ‘more Christian,’ the ones with or without a reward on board?”
Interestingly, while many “Christians” negatively spew about The Jefferson Bible, Jefferson's view of the deity of Jesus is shared by the majority of Americans today. In a 2022 poll, The State of Theology found that 52% of Americans and 43% of Evangelicals affirmed that “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.”
So what freedom can you give the word Christian? Do there have to be Stephen, Steve, and Stevie labels to delineate and divide? Or can one word give ethos, benefit and meaning to all alike?
Perhaps we can start, like Jefferson, to be genuine disciples first -- Christians, if you will -- and only then to expand to the "something more."
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1 https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2021/11/23/views-on-the-afterlife/
2 Why Thomas Jefferson Created His Own Bible Smithsonian Magazine September 8, 2020
3 https://thestateoftheology.com/ Key Findings US2022