What Do Christians Need to Believe?

From time to time, when I’m leading a theology day, I’ve posed the question, “What is the minimum you need to know to get into Heaven?” [Depending on the context, I’ve sometimes phrased it as “What is the minimum you need to believe?”] I ask people to visualise being at the Pearly Gates at the end of life, with St. Peter standing there, clipboard in hand, waiting on our answer. Ideally, I have them break into small groups to think it through together. The answers people come up with are always fascinating, not least when the groups disagree (including among themselves).

After we come back together, I generally will say, “When you’re posed a question, always consider whether your first response should be to ‘question the question’; in other words, to question the premise underlying the question.”

In this case, can it really be all about what someone knows or believes?

I don’t wish to be too controversial—or at least, not so early in the piece—but it would be fair to say that the devil and his demons know and believe all the right things, in the sense of having the correct information and knowing for sure that it’s true. Somehow, I doubt that St. Peter would let them in, so there has to be something more to it.

I wonder what your thoughts are at this point.

Believing in one (true) God might be first on the list.

Maybe you’d then refine that as believing in the Christian understanding of that God (as opposed to, say, the Muslim understanding).

That would include believing this one God exists eternally in three Persons (Father, Son, and Spirit)—all the while hoping St. Peter won’t also be expecting you to explain that extremely challenging doctrine.

Then there would need to be something more about Jesus—adding belief in his human incarnation, life, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension to believing in his eternal divine Sonship as the Second Person of the Trinity.

St. Peter will surely expect us to know and believe the correct doctrine of the atonement (namely, how Jesus saves us—not whether, but how, exactly) given that Scripture explains it in a multitude of ways, mostly through pictures and metaphor. Let’s hope multiple choices are on offer to make that one easier.

Since it’s already stressful enough at this point, and there’s now a long line of people waiting to take the test, we’ll give everyone a free pass over the ‘fully man’ and ‘fully God’ doctrine of the incarnation (another very challenging one to try to explain).  

But what, then, beyond that?

Going back to my first point—that we may need to “question the question” here—you may already be wondering, can it really be all about what people know, or what exactly they believe? Doesn’t that make it all sound rather transactional? Like getting a pass or a fail based on the equivalent of an exam result? Is that really what God is like? Is that really what God asks? Is what a person knows or believes about Jesus what gets them into Heaven?  

Perhaps you’ve been thinking about this more relationally than informationally. That it surely has to do with who you know rather than what you know. And that must be at least part of an answer, one would think.

But what does “knowing” God look like in practice? Or put differently, does one person’s understanding of what they think it means to “know God” pass the test, while another’s might fall short? Are charismatics closer to getting it right (with their generally more experiential ways of thinking) than traditionalist cessationists? Is there a “knowing God” relational standard that St. Peter is looking for?

In that group context I began with, it’s not uncommon for people to throw out a Bible verse (it’s usually just the one verse) as the biblical basis for their answer. For example, Paul and Silas’ response to the Philippian jailer in Acts 16: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household.” Or John 3:16: “whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” 

But without being picky, what exactly does “believe in” mean? That question, it seems to me, is the hinge on which the whole discussion turns. If it’s the basis for St. Peter letting us in, then we’d better be sure what it means.

Can we, in reality, ever be completely sure about the existence of an invisible God?

Or, is what we really mean by “believing in” God more accurately stated as a “more-likely-than-not” sense that there probably is a God and that the broadly-Christian understanding* of that God is the most credible one?

*I say broadly Christian simply because there are so many variations in the details among Christian groups.

Is it believing in the historic existence of a real person called Jesus?

Is it having the right understanding of Jesus as not just human but also divine (and able to explain how that works)?

Is it correctly articulating how Jesus has saved us (precisely which biblical explanation is the “right” one)?

You may have noticed I’m asking a lot of questions without answering many (if any). So let’s address that.

A better contemporary English word to explain the biblical concept of “believing” (and for that matter, “faith”) would be “trust.” Not in terms of mental certainty, but as choosing a lifestyle which visibly reflects trust.

In other words, to understand belief and faith as trust is to see them as doing words rather than thinking words.

Which translates to this: living the way someone would live—doing the things a person would do—if they knew for sure that the Christian story was true. Maybe read that again. A few times.

It means shaping our lives around that story being true, notwithstanding that the very reason God calls people to have faith (aka, trust) throughout Scripture is that he is well-aware that he is an invisible God and hence he knows full well that we can never know with absolute 100% certainty.

That’s where the faith comes in—manifest as a trust-reflecting lifestyle. This is why faith pleases God so much (the counterpart to Hebrews 11:6).     

One of the problems that can arise within certain presentations of a simple evangelical gospel (reflected in the thinking underlying The Sinner’s Prayer) is that it can make “being saved” feel formulaic—as though it were a one-time triggering event.

Its defenders will rightly say that the Prayer is intended only as the beginning of Christian life, not the last word on it. Evangelical theologians will also insist that a Christian life is never defined by such a “decision” alone. The difficulty is how easily that deeper understanding can become eviscerated in popular practice.

These questions become moot, however, if being saved is about how we then choose to live, rather than simply having said “amen” to a one-moment-in-time prayer that gets us a permanent tick in the box on St. Peter’s spreadsheet.

Christianity generally—and evangelicalism in particular—has traditionally been very focused on believing the right things. And that’s not a bad thing in itself (as a theologian and pastor, I, too, am very focused on wanting people to believe the right things). But it can too easily become a bad thing when the necessity of believing certain things becomes emphasised in the wrong way. For example, when some become exclusionary, or weaponised—insisted upon as non-negotiable “in-versus-out” boundary markers between Christians.

The right answer to that Pearly Gates question must be that it’s the wrong question! It’s a category error to think that St. Peter would be tasked with that in the first place.  Ultimately, who he is expecting to welcome in lies in the heart of God. Not because God has sovereignly predetermined some for salvation and others for condemnation (as some expressions within the Reformed tradition would frame it), and we’ll never know that until the final day, but because he knows every human heart in ways no doctrinal salvation formula can fully map.                      

Used well, evangelical Statements of Faith (of which there are a gazillion different versions and variations) can enhance our relationship with God. But their obvious limitation is that they are statements of beliefs, not statements of actions. That, in itself, can mislead people into thinking that what a person knows or believes is what’s most (or even, all) important.   

I would love for evangelicalism to place as much emphasis on also having what I would call Statements of Fruit—reflecting what Christian beliefs look like in practice.

Didn’t Jesus say something about “By their fruits you will know them”? (Matt 7:15–20) I take that to be saying that the divine definition of right beliefs is centred in right living rather than in right thinking in the doctrinal sense. I think it’s what James has in mind when he says, “I will show you my faith by my deeds.” (Jas 2:18)

It’s rather too easy to measure “being a Christian” by whether someone has prayed the Prayer, or whether they believe the right things (especially given the uncertainty of what that means) while paying scant, if any, attention to the importance of right beliefs manifest as right actions. But for those raised in the Reformed tradition, there can be a deep-seated hesitation (bordering on fear) around anything that sounds like “works.”

But perhaps, as a final thought, we might remember that when Jesus was asked about the most important commandment in Scripture (which we might well see as synonymous with the most important belief in Scripture) he chose one that was an action—a doing word: “Love God, love people.” And he added that this one (and it is one, not two) summed up the whole of Scripture, which I take to mean that the whole Christian belief system emanates from it as its centrifugal centre!      

So perhaps the Pearly Gates question was always the wrong one. Not because belief doesn’t matter, but because belief was never meant to function as an entrance exam.

The real question is not, “Did you pass the test?” but, “Did you live as though the story were true?”

To believe is to trust. To trust is to shape our lives around that trust. And the clearest evidence that such trust is real is not found in our ability to articulate divine doctrine, but in whether we have embodied divine love: love of God, love of neighbour.

If that is the measure, then the question shifts from information to transformation. And perhaps that has been Scripture’s definition of right believing all along.