What is Christianity?

People call themselves Christians. I call myself a Christian but I thought to note here the question of what this means.

Christianity seems to have a few flavours.

Personally I think Jesus' coming to Earth was to teach people Love. When asked what the most important commandments were he said, Love only the Lord God, and Love your neighbour as yourself. His dying on the cross was to show us just how far we should be prepared to go in the name of Love. He took no action to save himself, he showed us to Love and never hate to the bitter end.

In America Jesus seems to have become some authoritarian figure who will stamp his power on the Earth come the last judgment. His ultimate power justifes the Nation of Christ, it is the creation and the destruction of Earth and the creation of Life eternal. We need only believe in God and Jesus for this version.

Forgiveness of sins is another strand. Being morally good puts us in Gods good books. Jesus died on the cross in place of us because we are sinners and if we accept that Christ died for us then we have our sins forgiven. But we need to repent and aim to emulate Christ's perfection also, belief is not enough just to clear our sins.

There is no one interpretation and clearly the disciples have hought long and hard and given their interpretatons esp. John and Paul. But those interpretations are not the whole of Christ.

That there is no cenral dogma and no single explanation of Christ or what he was here to teach it makes mch more sense to me now why no-one is ever able to teach Christianity that clearly. Obviously theologians have done enormous work to tidy it up, but the stories came from many places and Christianity is not one thing.