Assembly of God here. We’ve had similar threads before & I answered pretty much as I’ll be answering now…
It’s not emphasized but I recently found out that officially, AoG is Young-Earth Creationist. (Indeed, I’ve heard lots of AoG preachers discuss the first Creation of millions of years, which included the dinosaur age & perhaps proto-humans, was destroyed in the Luciferian rebellion, and we now live in the Re-Creation detailed in the Six Days & are Adamic humanity- with no relation to the proto-humans of the first Creation.) I am Old-Earth Creationist with maybe some Theistic Evolution.
Jesus is the Only Savior & Only Way to God- Yes. However, I don’t think Death ends the opportunity to embrace Jesus as Savior & Lord. For those who resist God/Jesus, they may be allowed to- resist Them forever, to flicker out, or to eventually reconcile, no matter how long it takes. I believe there may be a Temporal Hell (Sheol-Hades) apart from God but I believe Ultimate Hell (Gehenna-The Lake of Fire) is the Perpetually-Resisted Unrelenting Presence of God/Jesus.
AoG teaches, with most of the Pentecostal-Charismatic movements, that already-saved Christians can & should experience “the Baptism in the Holy Spirit with the initial physical evidence of speaking in tongues” and that miraculous Spiritual Gifts can & should be a regular part of a believer’s life. I believe there are various experiences of the Holy Spirit, among which is speaking in tongues, but there are multitudes of perfectly good, Spirit-gifted Christians who never experience the more sensational Gifts.
AoG holds to the Pre-Tribulation Rapture & the Return of Jesus to establish His 1000-year Kingdom (Pre-Millenialism). I think that IF there is to be a future Tribulation & AntiChrist/Beast, the Rapture occcurs very late in it, almost simultanous with Christ’s Return to inauguate the Millenium. BUT it may well be that the Tribulation & AntiChrist/Beast refer to the first-century persecution of Christians by the Jerusalem Priesthood & Rome and then the Siege of Jerusalem by Rome, OR to the ongoing persecution of Christians by Beast-like tyrants & Harlot-Religions (including corrupted factions of Christianity) throughout history.
Alcohol- AoG teaches total abstinence. I’m a moderate drinker.
In some cases it isn’t so much the dogma itself as the exact phrasing. I’m RCC.
“This dude was born from a virgin, as in virgo intacta.” Well, it sure doesn’t seem particularly likely, but the way I see it, once you assume the existence of a GM, anything the GM does is within the rules by definition… if He fancied making N-humans male and viable vessels for Himself, whatever. That’s not what my faith hinges on, it’s actually quite unimportant from my PoV.
“This dude was born from a virgin, who was virgo intacta before, during and after the birth.” Riiiiight, it wasn’t enough with making N-humans possible, and male, and all that, either the Baby was able to pass through hymens without breaking them, or maybe just danced outside the womb via its frontal wall (and did He dance a quadrille or was it a waltz?), or God the Father dropped a Finger and used it to raise Mary’s hymen out of the way… and what has poor St Joe done to theologians anyway? I admire that he was willing to raise a child he hadn’t made, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t ever be allowed to get any!
To me, that phrasing indicates that a lot of theologians have Serious Mommy Issues, not that “God can do unimaginable things”.
I wouldn’t say I don’t accept Trinitarianism so much as not understand how my views are different from the “official” view. “Our explanations of the unexplainable nature of God are better than yours.” Well, okay. I am neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the substance, AFAICT.
Yeah, I do also believe that but you have to try really hard- like renouncing your Christian faith or wallow in serious sin. Tho one instance of something like child molesting would get HellFire, I’m sure.
I was raised Episcopalian and consider myself Christian, but I reject several portions of the typical dogma.
Trinity - I straight up reject this entire notion. The only biblical support for it I’ve ever seen is very weak and comes off more as “if we take this to be true, we can read it into these verses” rather than extracting from the text. I also don’t think believing it serves any purpose other than reinforcing the notion that God is so far beyond us as to never be understandable. It very much goes against much of my understanding of Jesus’s teachings about the nature of God.
Hell - For that matter, I don’t really so much believe in Heaven either, certainly not in the way it’s so often taught. I see it a lot more as allegory and a way of explaining concepts in a way that otherwise wouldn’t make sense to the people of the time. A lot of people look at heaven and hell as reward or punishment for our deeds.
Christmas/Easter - I don’t celebrate either of these holidays for a number of reasons, which we’ve explored in depth in other threads. I still get a lot of crap for it every year, despite that I haven’t celebrated either in almost a decade and even before that was luke-warm at best about them.
Thank you for this link! I’d never heard of this position before with respect to the Trinity. (I don’t read much into various ways Christians argue with each other.)
I suggest you read “Love Wins” by Rob Bell. Believing in the modern concept of Hell is not a requirement to be a Christian, and many Christians (past and present) have rejected it without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
As for me, my denomination (Anglican/Episcopal) is not big on dogma. The Nicene Creed is about it.
Constantine did not make any selection. He told Eusebius, a member of the mainstream church, to publish copies of the texts that Eusebius, (and the vast majority of the church leaders), already held to be scripture. There were scattered groups who tended to ignore, reject, or include specific individual works that are or are not recognized today, but there was a basic collection that pretty much looks like what is used, today. That collection dates back to the middle of the second century, not the early fourth.
Reading the Epistles suggests there always was dissent. They are full of warning of false teaching. Even if you argue for later dates for them, they would have been written to reflect first century thinking.
Again, that is not what scholars have said. Since this isn’t GQ I can’t demand substantiation, but I will state that you are simply wrong.
The fact also remains that you are avoiding the question. Regardless of who made the selection (and I would debate the relative influences of Constantine and Eusebius), it nonetheless a fact that there was a wealth of literature variously regarded as inspired that was not included in the canon.
There is also the issue of the various so-called “heresies” that were either wiped out or had already split off from the centralized church. Personally I think the gospels did the ancient equivalent of a prime-time makeover for Jesus, but the fact that we can never know one way or the other pretty much undermines any claims of authority anyone might like to make. And that is truly the only significant issue here.
I accept pretty much all of the Evangelical and Reformed doctrines except perhaps on evolution (than again lots of Evangelicals do believe in evolution).
You can ask for cites in GD. But I wouldn’t if I were you – you are wrong and tomndebb’s summary is correct. The biblical canon was pretty much settled in the second century, with a few exceptions here and there.
I used to be a staunch Christian as a teen, and even then I didn’t buy into anti-gay propoganda. It helped that a family friend was gay and I had known him since I was six. I won’t ever forget going to a very conservative church camp somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina, and just hearing the invective against homosexuals. The preacher claimed that gays do reprehensible things that will make you sick to your stomach. And I was just sitting there thinking, ‘‘Don’t they just screw each other in the ass?’’
I’m a Buddhist, but I don’t believe in reincarnation, or karma, really. That part just seems superstitious to me.
OK, then can you provide authority for that claim. As I’ve already admitted, my primary source of knowledge is the several documentaries I’ve seen (often multiple times) on the early church and related topics. Either my memory is flawed (possible) or every scholar interviewed on the subject has said something very different. Thanks.
edit: I did major in religion in college and had some exposure to these things but my specialty was Mahayana Buddhism.
Perhaps there’s disagreement about what’s actually being said here. Everyone agrees that there were gnostic movements and other heretical movements branching off of Christianity, and that they existed at some point in the second century A.D. A few scholars, but not many, have argued that those movements originated in the mid first century, which would put them contemporary with the works of Paul and the other Apostles. There’s no evidence for this, though, and most scholars agree that both the gnostic movements and the so-called gnostic gospels date to mid-to-late second century. The early Church believed that the New Testament writings came from a time when eyewitnesses to Jesus were still alive, and that they represented honest attempts to record the life and teaching of Jesus. The gnostic gospels–and other writings of the heretical movements–they believed to date from several generations later, and to be blatantly biased in their attempts to pin things on Jesus which he never actually said. Modern scholarship has largely confirmed the correctness of this assessment; see in particular the Canon of the New Testament series by the late Dr. Bruce Metzger of Princeton, who was the acknowledged leading expert on New Testament studies during his lifetime.
So while there were different groups calling themselves Christian and putting forth different texts as authentic as early as the second century, I see no reason why this fact should cast doubt on my faith. The historical record is clear that from as early as there was a canon, the actual Church that was founded by Jesus Christ and sought to follow His teachings kept a consistent canon, most notably in regards to the four gospels and only those four. Within that Church, disputes about canonicity dealt with just a small portion of the texts; indeed only 2 Peter and Revelations were in any question by Constantine’s time.