Sorry for the clumsy title. If I am in the wrong forum, would a mod kindly move the thread?
This thought often occurs to me, so I want to get it out now, since it just hit me again.
I know a lot of Christians don’t take the Bible literally, or don’t follow a lot of the traditional ideas about the bible. For instance, many Christians don’t believe in hell, regardless of the pope’s stand on that. And many Christians don’t believe that the earth was literally made in six days. Many of these modern Christians are likely to agree with scientists about how the universe came to be what it is today, but they just believe that God guided it, or something…I’ve heard a lot of variants but always the same idea…that they don’t take the Bible literally… no talking snakes or salted women.
Do these same Christians also not believe that Jesus died and came back three days later? Can one not believe that and still be considered a Christian?
Please forgive me if this has been discussed to death and back three days later. I simply couldn’t figure out how to search such a thing with there being a billion religion threads in the search.
That’s probably been the common pattern among the vast majority of Christians since whenever. Biblical literalism is a comparatively recent fad, but the Creed (Nicene or Apostles’, take your pick) is quite explicit about including the death and resurrection of Jesus as an article of faith.
The Bible is a big book, and “doesn’t take ALL the Bible literally” applies to pretty much everyone.
For instance, I know of nobody who would tell you that this passage relates a real event. It’s a teaching story. Some people put relatively more of the bible into the “teaching story” category, some less. But the death and ressurection bit is pretty central.
No, it’s the Parable of the Good Samaritan (quote the post and you’ll see “Luke 10: 30-35”). But that’s Jesus telling a teaching story, not the writer telling a teaching story through an apocryphal deed or word of Jesus.
I’d call anyone who believes that Christ was god a Christian. I suppose some people could believe he was god but not think he rose from the dead, or could disagree on what is meant by his rising from the dead.
And then, of course, there are the large, large number of people who thoroughly identify as Christians because they like the church community and the moral teachings and Christmas and whatnot, but don’t actually believe any of the supernatural stuff.
Religious beliefs are much like internet porn: If you can imagine it, someone’s beat you to it.
I’ve definitely known people who identify as Christian because they find value in the teachings of Jesus as related by the Gospels plus, to a varying degree, some of the writings of Paul (Paul’s been losing favor with the hip set, it seems). One can definitely use these teachings as a guide in one’s own life without believing in the Resurrection.
Of course, as the organization and dogma of the various Christian religions vary, you can also find Christians who will say that “those people” are not real Christians because they do not believe in the Resurrection.
The Roman Catholic Church is about as organized as Christian churches get and much of the dogma is laid out by a hierarchical structure of authority. Even so, when I was in Catholic high school I was taught in Religion class that ultimately it is the “religious message” of the text that is important- not the literal truth (or lack thereof). As such, the belief that Jesus’ life and teachings were so powerful and inspirational that the impact of his life survived his corporeal death and that he experienced a new life in his lasting influence- this would all be a valid interpretation of the Resurrection. NOTE: Although I went to a Catholic high school, the priests were Jesuits. Jesuits have a tendency to get excommunicated. You would not be likely to find any mainstream Catholic leaders would would condone such an interpretation.
As a Catholic, yes, I don’t take the bible literally but do believe in the Resurrection and in the virgin birth. Because I do believe in the miraculous, and without that, where’s the divinity?
Uh, yeah, that was what I meant to quote. No idea what I did to make that screw up. Anyway, my point is everybody knows that and other parables are teaching stories because they’re “framed” in the context of Jesus teaching. But a lot of people would also say Job is a teaching story, by various cues in the text.
Thanks for the replies, guys. It seems to me that if someone identifies as Christian, there really aren’t any assumptions I can make at all. It’s just too varied to assume anything.
I think I had started, in my mind, jumping to the idea that if a Christian said they didn’t believe in talking snakes or whatever, that meant that they rejected the idea of all biblical miracles. So, I had separated Christians as those who believed in the burning bush, split red sea, virgin birth, walking on water, etc…and those who didn’t believe in any of those things, but instead interpreted those things as parables or teaching moments or whatever.
So, I was trying to find boxes and labels, but it’s never that easy.
You kind of excluded the middle there. Between “All accounts of the supernatural are true” and “No accounts of the supernatural are true” there is a great gulf fixed.
Yeah, because I was trying to make it make sense in my pea brain. I can’t understand, “Oh, I believe that Jesus rose from the dead, but I don’t believe the nonsense about changing water to wine.”
The Bible is a collection of writings in various genres, including history (as it was understood thousands of years ago), parable, and poetry. I don’t take everything in the Bible literally, because I don’t believe everything was intended by its original authors to be taken literally, or was taken literally by its original audience. But I do believe that the Biblical writers who wrote about Jesus’s resurrection believed, and intended to say, that it really, literally happened.
Although, we could have a Great Debate about what it means to take something literally. In a sense, all language can only be symbolic of Reality.
Right – notice the Creed does not say anywhere “We Believe in the Bible”. It does explicitly proclaim the virgin birth, the crucifixion, death, resurrection and ascencion, redemption of sin and the future Second Coming, but about cosmology it just says “The Father created Heaven and Earth” and does not go into details of how. The only references in the Nicene Creed to the holy writings are the claim that Christ’s death and resurrection happened “according to Scripture” and that the Holy Spirit spoke through the Prophets – that is, about interpretation of prophesy, not about factual record.
ISTM hardline literalism along the lines of “if you don’t accept one thing, how can you accept any of the other things” would be a position arising when the “mainstream” churches began making their peace with science as an explanation for the physical world in that you do not *need *a miracle to make life originate on Earth, you do to bring about Ressurrection.
And I’m quite prepared to believe that the story about changing water into wine is factually true too. Substituting one kind of matter for another doesn’t strike me as inherently harder than causing a virgin to become pregnant with a diploid child or a dead person to come back to life. Of course the laws of physics/chemistry/biology forbid such shenanigans. Otherwise “miracle” would just mean “something that happens from time to time according to the normal operation of the universe”.
