For most of my Christian life, I was very good at knowing what I believed.

I knew what I believed about the Bible. I knew what I believed about salvation. I knew what I believed about heaven and hell, sex and marriage, baptism and communion, creation and the end times. I could tell you why Jesus died, what happened when you became a Christian, which spiritual gifts were still operating, whether Christians could lose their salvation, and precisely what sequence of events would unfold when Jesus returned.

I even knew what I believed about people who believed differently from me.

They were wrong.

Obviously.

This wasn’t unusual. In the Christian world I grew up in, knowing what you believed was incredibly important. Churches had statements of faith. Denominations had doctrinal positions. Bible colleges had theology exams. Pastors preached sermon series explaining what we believed and, occasionally, why the church down the street had got it horribly wrong.

And underneath all of this was an assumption I don’t remember anyone ever stating explicitly: Being a good Christian meant believing the right things. Of course, you were supposed to be a good person as well. Nobody was handing out certificates for theological accuracy while encouraging you to be an asshole.

But when push came to shove, belief was the thing that defined the boundaries.

You could be impatient, arrogant, greedy, unkind, chronically angry, or spectacularly lacking in self-awareness and still be considered a mature Christian. But change your theology about hell, though, and suddenly people became concerned about your salvation.

I know. I tried it.

Over the years, that has left me wondering whether there might actually be two very different ways of understanding what it means to be a Christian.

One begins with the question, ‘What do I need to believe?’

The other begins somewhere else entirely: What kind of person am I becoming?

Those questions sound similar.

I’m increasingly convinced they can lead to two very different kinds of Christianity.

The First Way: What Do I Need to Believe?

The first way of being Christian is primarily concerned with what you believe. Its central questions are theological. Who is God? Who is Jesus? What is the Bible? What is sin? Why did Jesus die? How are we saved? What happens after we die?

I know this version of Christianity extremely well because it’s the one that formed me.

Growing in my faith meant learning better answers to those questions. I studied the Bible. I listened to sermons. I read theology. I learned doctrine. Eventually, I went to Bible college and earned an entire degree in it.

The deeper you went, the more finely tuned the questions became.

Was the Bible inspired or inerrant? Was election conditional or unconditional? Was the atonement penal substitutionary, Christus Victor, or something else? Was the millennium pre-, post-, or amillennial? Could women preach? Could Christians speak in tongues? Could salvation be lost?

None of these are necessarily bad questions. Some of them matter enormously. What we believe about God can profoundly affect the way we understand ourselves, other people and the world.

The problem begins when having the right answers becomes the measure of Christian faithfulness itself.

Then Christianity starts functioning a little like an exam.

There are correct answers and incorrect answers. There are beliefs that place you safely inside the boundaries and beliefs that put you outside them. Spiritual maturity can begin to look suspiciously like theological certainty.

I spent years becoming very good at that kind of Christianity.

I knew where I stood.

What I didn’t always stop to ask was what all those beliefs were actually doing to me.

When Believing the Right Things Becomes the Point

There is a logical consequence to making correct belief the primary measure of Christian faithfulness: You become very interested in who believes the wrong things. That makes sense. If someone’s eternal destiny depends on believing certain things about God, then theological error isn’t merely an intellectual disagreement. It can become an emergency.

Suddenly, boundaries matter enormously.

Who is in? Who is out? Which doctrines are essential? How far can someone depart from accepted Christian belief before they are no longer Christian at all?

Christians have spent an extraordinary amount of energy answering those questions.

You can see it in church history, where disagreements about doctrine produced councils, creeds, schisms, excommunications and, at their ugliest extremes, persecution and violence. You can still see it today, albeit usually without the violence, whenever denominations split, churches fracture or Christians denounce one another over theology.

Again, this isn’t because beliefs don’t matter. Some ideas are destructive. Some theological claims deserve to be challenged.

The strange thing is the inconsistency in what we treat as disqualifying.

A pastor can be arrogant, controlling, obsessed with money or notoriously difficult to work with, and people may describe these things as “character flaws”. But let that same pastor announce that he no longer believes in the Trinity, and nobody calls it a character flaw.

Now we have a theological crisis.

I’ve seen versions of this at an ordinary level too. Christians can gossip, hold grudges for decades, treat hospitality as optional, accumulate enormous wealth, despise their enemies and speak contemptuously about people they disagree with, while remaining unquestionably Christian.

Yet change your position on hell, sexuality, biblical inerrancy or the atonement, and suddenly the question arises: Are you even a Christian anymore?

That tells us something about what we’re actually measuring.

We may say that Christianity is about following Jesus.

But our boundaries often suggest that believing the correct things about Jesus matters more than becoming like him. And perhaps that’s exactly what we should expect from a Christianity built primarily around the question, ‘What do I need to believe?’

The Second Way: What Kind of Person Am I Becoming?

There is another way to approach the Christian life. Instead of asking primarily, “What do I need to believe?” it begins with a different question: “What kind of person am I becoming?”

It’s a subtle shift, but it changes almost everything.

Suddenly, spiritual growth isn’t measured primarily by how much theology I know or how certain I am about it. It’s measured by what is happening to me.

Am I becoming more loving?

Am I more patient than I used to be? More generous? More forgiving? Am I less threatened by people who disagree with me? Am I becoming better at admitting when I’m wrong? Do I notice people I once overlooked? Am I more compassionate toward people whose lives I don’t understand?

In other words, the evidence of spiritual growth isn’t merely found in what I can articulate. It’s found in the kind of person I am becoming.

Christians have traditionally called this spiritual formation.

The basic idea is that following Jesus is supposed to slowly reshape us. Our habits change. Our desires change. Our instinctive reactions change. The things that once controlled us begin to loosen their grip. Over time, the person we are becoming should bear some resemblance to the person we claim to follow.

That doesn’t make theology irrelevant.

In fact, it gives theology an important job.

What I believe about God should shape the way I live. If I believe God is merciful, that ought to make me more merciful. If I believe every human being bears the image of God, that ought to affect how I treat the person I despise. If I believe grace is something I have received without earning it, you would hope I might become a little more gracious toward people who haven’t earned mine.

Under this way of understanding Christianity, then, theology isn’t the destination.

It’s formative.

And that changes the questions we ask about our beliefs.

Instead of only asking, Is this belief correct? We can also ask: What is this belief producing in me?

Is it making me more loving or more afraid? More compassionate or more judgemental? More humble or more certain of my own superiority? Is my Christianity expanding my capacity to love people, or simply giving me increasingly sophisticated reasons for deciding which people I don’t have to love?

Those aren’t replacements for theological questions.

But they are theological questions.

Because if what I believe about God never changes the kind of person I am becoming, eventually I have to wonder what exactly all that believing is for.

Jesus Had a Surprisingly Practical Test for Faith

This brings us to Jesus.

Because if there really are two ways of approaching the Christian life, it seems reasonable to ask which one looks most like the way Jesus talked about it.

And one thing becomes difficult to miss when you read the Gospels.

Jesus talks about fruit. A lot.

“Every good tree bears good fruit,” he says in the Sermon on the Mount, before adding, “By their fruit you will recognise them.”

It’s a wonderfully simple image.

If you want to know what kind of tree you’re looking at, eventually you look at what grows on it.

Jesus applies much the same logic to people.

Toward the end of the Sermon on the Mount, he describes two people who both hear his teaching. One builds his house on rock and the other builds on sand. The difference isn’t knowledge. They both heard exactly the same teaching.

The difference is what they did with it.

Jesus makes the point even more uncomfortable immediately beforehand when he warns that simply calling him “Lord” isn’t enough. Apparently, it is possible to say the right thing about Jesus and still completely miss what Jesus is asking of you.

In Matthew 25, Jesus tells a story about the end of the world. All the nations are gathered before him, and he separates the people into two groups, much as a shepherd might separate sheep from goats at the end of the day. To one group, Jesus says that when he was hungry, they fed him; when he was thirsty, they gave him something to drink; when he was a stranger, they welcomed him; when he was sick, they cared for him; and when he was in prison, they came to visit. The strange thing is that they have no idea what he’s talking about. They can’t remember ever doing any of those things for Jesus. He explains that whenever they cared for one of “the least of these”, they were caring for him.

Then Jesus turns to the other group and tells them that when he was hungry, thirsty, sick, imprisoned or a stranger, they did nothing. They are equally confused. When did they ever see Jesus in need and ignore him? Again, Jesus identifies himself with the people they failed to notice. It’s a confronting story for all sorts of reasons, but in the context of what we’re talking about here, one detail is hard to miss: the difference between the two groups isn’t presented as a difference in what they believed. It’s a difference in what they did.

None of this means Jesus was indifferent to belief. He clearly wasn’t. He talked about faith, truth, God, Scripture, judgement and plenty of other theological matters.

But Jesus repeatedly refuses to allow faith to remain theoretical. And perhaps that’s the connection between our two kinds of Christianity. The problem was never believing things.

The problem begins when we mistake believing the right things for the thing those beliefs were supposed to produce.

There Are More Question Marks Now

There was a time when I could have told you what I believed about almost everything.

These days, there are considerably more question marks.

Ask me exactly how the atonement works, what happens immediately after we die, how inspiration works, what hell is, or precisely what happens at the end of history, and you’re much more likely to hear me say, “I’m not sure.”

Twenty years ago, that would have frightened me. I would have interpreted uncertainty as evidence that my faith was getting weaker.

I don’t see it that way anymore.

Part of it is probably just getting older. I’ve changed my mind too many times now to assume that whatever I happen to believe at this particular moment is definitely the position I’ll hold for the rest of my life. I’ve also met too many good people who believe very different things from me.

And I’ve been wrong before.

Quite confidently wrong, actually.

So I still care about theology. I still read it, write about it, argue about it and probably spend far too much time thinking about it. I’m not suggesting that all beliefs are equally good or that it doesn’t matter what we believe.

I just don’t think having all the correct answers is the best measure of whether Christianity is actually doing anything to me.

At this point in my life, I’m probably more interested in whether I’m becoming less of an asshole.

I mean that seriously.

Whether I’m more patient with my family. Whether I’m quicker to apologise. Whether I can disagree with someone without needing to demolish them. Whether I’m becoming more generous. Whether I’m still able to change my mind. Whether the people who actually know me, rather than the people who read what I write on the internet, would describe me as loving.

So perhaps there really are two ways of being a Christian.

One is to spend your life trying to make sure you believe all the right things.

The other is to spend your life trying to become the kind of person Jesus taught us to become.