Christianity, for all its exalted moral code, doesn’t come to much unless we come to terms with Christ. But just who is he?

We Christians have been asking that question from the very start. As his first disciples followed him along the dusty roads, hearing him say startling things and watching him heal bodies and souls, the question must have deepened in them steadily. What manner of being is this?

They saw Jesus lead people out of disease, out of madness, out of lives of despair. They witnessed his sternness with religious hypocrites, and saw his love for the children who flocked to him. (That latter sight surely moved some of those rough, dusty men to tears. Some were probably fathers, far away from their own beloved children.)

By the time of the crucifixion and the confusing, enrapturing events that followed, his followers were long past thinking of Jesus just as a great teacher, another God-inspired prophet. They knew him as someone uniquely linked to God, who spoke with God’s own authority _ who even had said, shockingly, "I and the Father are one."

But what could that possibly mean? No prayer was more sacred to those devout Jews than the magnificent Sh’ma: "Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is one!" How dare they say, even to themselves, that this Jesus shared the oneness of God?

The wrestling with that question emerges in the first Christian sermon, given on Pentecost by Peter the fisherman. That blunt man, carried away in ecstasy of spirit, stood before a big crowd and shouted the following:

"Men of Israel, listen to what I am going to say! Jesus the Nazarene was a man commended to you by God by the miracles and portents and signs that God worked through him when he was among you, as you know. This man, who was put into your power by the deliberate intention and foreknowledge of God, you took and had crucified and killed by men outside the Law. But God raised him to life, freeing him from the pangs of Hades, for it was impossible for him to be held in its power ..."

The language is interesting, isn’t it? Jesus is still a man through whom God has done astounding things, and toward whom God showed ultimate approval by raising Jesus up from the dead. (Note that in Peter’s words, Christ’s resurrection was something done, not by him, but to him by the Great One God.) Peter is still making a distinction between the transcendent Almighty, on the one hand, and "this man," through whom he worked mighty deeds.

But that careful distinction didn’t last long. As the recollections that became the Gospels were traded among first-generation Christians, believers were soon saying, with deep awe, that Jesus was indeed God, who had entered the midst of humanity to draw us away from sinfulness and back to him.

But how to explain to themselves the relationship between this amazing man, with whom they had traveled and laughed and even wept, and Almighty God, somehow truly present within him? The question brought the appearance of Christian theology, which strives to illumine religious beliefs with the light of human reasoning. In the old Latin formula, theology is "fidens quaerens intellectus." It is faith searching for understanding.

The early Christian centuries, especially the fifth and sixth, are buzzing with theologians probing the relation in Jesus of divinity and his humanness. They created dozens of involved, contradictory explanations. Bishops gathered in councils to debate, always ending by accepting one definition and condemning the rest. There were scores of councils across those years. One amused pagan said, "The roads were crowded with galloping bishops."

I am not demeaning theology. It surely has proved useful, if sometimes scandalous when humans use it to bludgeon one another, or when one group of Christians is perversely pleased to damn to hell all other kinds, not to mention the rest of humanity, But, set aside theology. Try another approach to Christ Jesus, one that trusts his saying that "I am with you all days, even to the end of the earth."

For the Jesus essential to us is neither the Jesus of 21 centuries ago, nor the Jesus who has been wound and shrouded in dogma across all those years. We Christians believe that Jesus Christ is a continuing, living presence right now, in our own time. We believe that he is immediately accessible to us, as close to us as our own beings, our own hearts.

And, in prayer, that is where we should first seek him, behind our own closed eyes, inside our own private darkness. He has said, "I am with you." Take him at his word.

Jim Atwell is a member of The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers).