Religion?

“Height?”

“Five five and a half”

A nurse was asking my wife questions from a survey while we were in the hospital.

“Allergies?”

“Cats and dust.”

“Religion?”

Here my wife paused and then made a strange sound. The noise began when the breath she was holding released. It was a guttural, phlegmy “ch” that sounded a little German, maybe…or perhaps from the Hebrew alphabet.

The nurse looked up and raised her eyebrows.

I knew what Marcy was thinking: how do you answer that question in one word?

“Evangelical Christian,” Marcy said tentatively, as if she were taking a guess on Jeopardy.

The nurse looked at an implausibly long checklist of religions. “Evangelical Christian” wasn’t on it. She marked “Christian”.

I suppose for the purpose of a medical checklist, that was sufficient.

When it comes right down to it, “Christian” is the right answer, but that word is so destroyed that it holds absolutely no meaning anymore. It seems that a whole lot of people call themselves “Christian”, but not everyone knows what it means. C. S. Lewis noted this destruction of words by citing the word “gentleman” as an example. A gentleman—as the word originally meant—was a landowner. By hearing someone referenced as a gentleman, you would know something about that person. But then people started applying the word gentleman to non-landowners, implying that some people acted in a certain way even if they did not own land. This broadened and then changed the connotative definition. Now, not all landowners are gentlemen, and not all gentlemen are landowners. The word has lost its meaning.

“Christian” meant “Christ-like” and “follower of Christ”.

So on a checklist, how do you say, “I’m a Christian, but I’m the kind of Christian who believes in God who created Heaven and Earth (both of which I believe actually exist) and mankind in his image, although we fell into sin in Adam and are now sinful both by nature and choice, but I also believe in God’s only Son, Jesus, who is both true God and true man and came to pay for our sins so that if we choose Him in faith we spend eternity with Him in Heaven and not in Hell with the devil (both of which I also believe exists) and I am currently active and not passive as a follower of Christ.”

“And more than that, I know God as one who exercise kindness, love, justice, mercy, and grace on earth, for it’s in these things He delights.”

Turn to Checklist 3B-Form 2 for questions about the Holy Spirit and Checklist 5A-Form 7 for questions about baptism.