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The Bible’s Go-To Language for What We Call a “Christian”
Union with Christ
One of the things that surprised me the most when I began to think through this whole issue was how little the Bible uses the language of being a Christian. That’s our go-to terminology. If you’re a follower of Jesus, you’re a Christian. The religion is Christianity. And yet the word “Christian” appears only two or three times in the New Testament—the first time as a sort of nickname for the early believers.
Instead, the Bible’s go-to language for what we call “Christian” is being “in Christ.” John uses that language three dozen times. Paul uses close to 300 times. The language of being “in him,” “in Jesus,” or him being “in us,” that union language is the Bible’s default terminology for what we mean by being Christian, which I don’t think is insignificant because the primary terminology we use reflects how we conceive our Christian life to be.
One with My Lord
Sam Allberry
Brief, compelling devotionals by Sam Allberry help believers understand what it means to be “in Christ” and how unity with Jesus shapes their daily lives.
And if the Bible’s main terminology has to do with our union with Jesus, then we are likely to miss something if that concept isn’t in our own terminology. If our own language is merely I’m a Christian or I follow Christianity, we might miss that whole dimension that the Bible is foregrounding. And so it’s good for me to remember that being a Christian isn’t just that I’m following Jesus, as if he’s at the other end of the universe and I’m trying to catch up to him. I’m in Christ. I could not be closer to him spiritually.
At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, when Jesus said, “Surely I am with you always to the very end of the age,” this is how, because he’s spiritually with us through our union with him. So I still use the term “Christian.” It’s hard not to. But I also want to just make sure I’m being more intentional about using the language of that union to describe what it means to be a Christian, so that hopefully that concept doesn’t slide out of our consciousness. Because if it does, we will miss so many of the rich things that come with our union with Jesus.
Sam Allberry is the author of One with My Lord: The Life-Changing Reality of Being in Christ.
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