Christians have long accepted changing standards over time, even where they contradict the Bible.
In the 18th and 19th centuries many Christians justified slavery on the grounds that the Bible considers it acceptable… which it certainly does. Christians do not do so today.
St. Paul said that women should cover their heads with a headscarf and remain silent in church. How many Christians accept that today?
Most Christians seem to accept that social norms are not rigid, and even Biblical standards can become invalid as society changes. As I understand it (as a non-Christian and non-expert), evangelical churches believe that the text of the Bible is the direct word of God - but still manage to pick and choose which they actually want to follow. Other mainstream denominations believe that the Gospels, etc. are just human accounts. The originators may have been holy and divinely inspired people, but their accounts are not the direct word of God. It’s someone’s account of someone else’s account of what Matthew or Mark whoever told them.
In practice, Church doctrine has always changed and evolved.
Roughly, but yes. It’s the fundamentalist-mainline divide. Traditionally, Christianity was not ‘sola scriptura’ (If for no other reason than in the first century, there were no ‘New Testament’ scriptures.) Christianity was oral out of necessity and people essentially attempted to glean from Christ’s words how we were to act and behave. As Christianity institutionalized, traditions and lines of thought began to form around what meant what. People wanted to know what their forebears thought on the issues, so their writings were collected. Paul’s were particularly popular (leading to some imitators claiming to be Paul), but there were others that people thought were pretty close to what they felt Christ was saying. Eventually you end up with various committees deciding what is or isn’t Scripture, but there is still a tendency to rely on tradition or even debate to really figure out what God wanted in the world.
The Reformation is what changed things for good or for ill. With the dissolution of the Catholic Church as authority over these groups, they didn’t really have that traditional basis or years of scholarship and official decrees upon which to base their religious beliefs, so many said, “Well, the oldest writings are the best writings, so what they say will be the final and perhaps only word on the subject.” This is called ‘sola scriptura’ Of course, this still wasn’t a universally accepted idea and you end up with groups like the Quakers who think that only divine revelation matters. You also end up with Protestant groups like the CoE and its Methodist off shoot that respected Scripture, but thought that it had to be filtered through tradition, experience and reason (An exegetical method called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral which still informs those offshoots. It is also called prima scriptura meaning that Scripture is important to understanding God, but it’s hardly the only thing.)
Anyway, what this means though is that Evangelicals tend to view the Bible as the literal word of God. He had complete editorial authority and what’s there is plain as plain and easy to understand.
Mainlines tend to view the Bible as a collection of writings that God had a hand in, but that reflected the political and cultural climates in which they were written and individual authors had their own voices and ways of understanding God. That the Torah was largely compiled during the Babylonian captivity and so reflected the views of Exilic Jews attempting to come to terms with the destruction of their culture and way of life. It informs much of the text and should be viewed through that lens. This isn’t to say that it isn’t a valuable period and a text through which we can learn about God, but to view it as some sort of final say of ‘This is God.’ strikes many mainlines as naive.
As such, Fundamentalists tend to approach questions of human behavior via Scripture. “It says not to kill, so we don’t.” Mainlines tend to approach them via what we know of God. They tend to assign what they believe are attributes to God and then apply them to situations. An Evangelical might say, “Homosexuality is wrong because Paul says so, right here.” A Mainline might retort that Paul said a lot of things and good for Paul, but what we believe God to be is one of love, who wants communion with his people and wants them to love one another as well as to love God and two people who happen to have the same parts can certainly love one another and of course God loves them, so what exactly is the problem?
But if I’m a baker and a gay person wants me to make up this special cake for a gay wedding, then no. Here is a list of 20 other bakers who will do it for you. Now if the person wants a dozen cupcakes I already have on display, no problem.
Also I should be able to decline a cake for a bachelor party that features a naked woman on the front.
Why do you think Paul had such influence over Christianity, especially fundamentalist Protestantism? Wasn’t he a Pharisee? Aren’t a lot of his writings Pharisee-leaning?
Looking at some 20th-century history, alcohol prohibition was much more popular in Protestant areas than Catholic ones. Today, zero tolerance on drugs also seems to be more popular in formerly/Protestant areas than in formerly/Catholic areas (compare Portugal vs Sweden). How come?
How about a divorced person remarrying? Birthday cake for an illegitimate child? A disabled or disfigured person?
Do you check the fiber content of the clothing your customer is wearing?
Gay marriage is a civil union unless sanctioned by a religious organization, in which case it becomes both a civil and a religious union. I believe in Gay marriage because I believe in the worth of the Bill of Rights, which has nothing to do with my religious affiliation or beliefs.
“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and render unto God the things that are God’s.” — J. C.
He had an influence on fundamentalist Protestantism because he wrote at least 7 books of the Bible and perhaps as many as 9. When you write 1/3 of the only thing that people believe to be divine truth, you have a lot of sway.
As to why Christianity as a whole looks toward Paul, it is two reasons. The first is that Paul was a Roman citizen and relatively well-to-do. This allowed him to travel and he held educated, rather cosmopolitan ideas. The early church was primarily a Jewish sect. It seems likely that Christ had nothing against Gentiles and one can never really be sure, but there are enough references to Gentiles in the Gospels that I think it’s reasonable to assume that he had some not entirely negative interactions with them. Still though, his preaching was largely confined to a Jewish audience and after his death it likely remained Jewish. Paul though really is the one who brought Christianity to a non-Jewish audience. He was specifically preaching to non-Jews. Since he was preaching to non-Jews, they didn’t really know what to do in regards to worshiping God. This meant that he was more apt to explain things to them when they ran into problems and to lay things out in a more basic manner that might not have been required by Jewish audiences who were well-versed in Jewish tradition. It also meant that he ended up representing Gentile interests in early debates and this raised his status. The fact that he was educated also meant that he was able to write and his ideas were able to be disseminated through more than just an oral tradition. Paul is really more than anyone else (certainly of that period anyway) responsible for Europe becoming Christian and when Gentile scholars decided to make the canon, Paul ended up with a prominent place in it.
It’s clear from human history that people can believe in God and anything else at the same time no matter how contradictory it would be. And if you point out the contradiction, they come up with some sort of handwaving explanation that makes it seem okay to them.
If you believe what’s written in the Bible is from God, then homosexuality is an abomination to Him. We can come up with all sorts of handwaving if that makes us uncomfortable, but if God says it’s an abomination, then it’s an abomination. But Christians who support gay marriage will say that whoever wrote those passages was misunderstood, or God didn’t mean it, or whatever else makes them feel better.
There’s also the alternative that God doesn’t exist, in which case the Bible was written by normal men with the morals of the environment they lived in.
But if you’re just asking if humans can believe in contradictory ideas at the same time, then the answer is absolutely yes. That doesn’t mean those ideas are true, it just means humans are especially skilled at creating justifications and explanations that allow them to believe in multiple contradictory ideas at the same time.
Sorry, didn’t answer this one. My guess is that’s sort of on me (or Methodism anyway.) Bottom line is that prior to the Reformation, Christians all drank. After the Reformation, most Christians drank. John Wesley (the founder of Methodism) believed in living a ‘holy’ life. Part of that holiness was how it interacted with the world around it and how this ‘holy’ living should impact the world for good. Wesley felt that a number of social ills could be based on over-consumption of alcohol. He also was famously an early health freak and believed in vegetarianism (vegetarianism never caught on among Methodists, Praise be to God) As such, he would on occasion preach against Methodists supporting people who sold alcohol since it led to health and social issues. Some Methodists followed this, others didn’t. By the early 1800s though, a solid majority of Methodists had become tee-totallers.
Enter into this Benjamin Rush. Mr. Rush is one of the lesser known founding fathers and also one of the most religious ones-he proposed requiring the Bible as a textbook in public schools and the US government buying a Bible for every citizen-Thomas Jefferson did not approve. He was really one of the last real Renaissance men and a very interesting character and it’s a shame we don’t spend more time learning about him but I digress. Rush was a physician and became convinced that alcohol was a demon drink. He rightly concluded that rather than alcoholism being a choice, it was a disease and as such he thought that we needed to do away with the carrier of the disease, namely alcohol itself. As a religious guy, he went to the churches to get them to sign on and found a very willing audience within American Methodism (and later Calvinism to some extent.) Thus began the Temperance Movement.
What happened though in the late-19th and early 20th-century is that the Temperance Movement became politicized. This was due to two things. Women’s suffrage and mass immigration. The women’s suffrage movement was heavily, heavily allied with the Temperance Movement (It’s not coincidence that the largest temperance organization was the WOMEN’S Christian Temperance Union-of which my grandmother was a proud card-carrying member until her death in 2005. She was born prior to the 19th amendment and saw them as staunch defenders of women’s rights until her death. She was pro-union, pro-choice and pro-temperance and woe to any that defied her, but I digress again.) They saw alcohol, or more accurately saloons as bastions of male patriarchy–places where women were generally not allowed and places where men exchanged misogynistic viewpoints. As such, they were the enemy and suffragettes found willing allies in pro-Temperance churches. Immigration was the other feeder of the Temperance movement. Immigrants around the turn of the century had stopped coming from western Europe and were increasingly Eastern and Southern European which also meant they were Catholic and as an Eastern European I can assure you well disposed toward enjoying their alcohol. Being seen as anti-alcohol was in many ways a virtue signal to show that you were ‘Pro-American’ as opposed to a Catholic immigrant. Churches helped feed that general dichotomy.
So the long and short of this is that Protestantism generally became associated with temperance and progressivism and this spread from the Americas into other Protestant countries especially the UK where Methodism still held some sway. Catholicism did not get this association and was generally seen as less progressive and certainly not temperate.
So if you want to know why Protestants got associated with anti-alcohol legislation, blame John Wesley, Benjamin Rush and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
You seem to think there are only two alternatives: believing what’s written in the Bible is from God, or believing that God doesn’t exist. Guess what? You can believe in God without believing that every word in the Bible came directly from God. You can even believe in God and also believe the entire Bible is a heap of horseshit. That’s only a “contradiction” if you tautologically insist that the Bible came from God because God wrote the Bible.
Yeah I did, but I don’t see how it invalidates what I said. People don’t have contradictory beliefs about God because of any particular aspect of God. People have contradictory beliefs about all sorts of things that don’t have anything to do with religion. If people want to believe A and B are true, then they’ll come up with a justification that both A and B are true. Whether that’s “God and gay marriage” or “Pizza store and paedophilia” , they’ll find a way.
The point is that for most Christians there is no contradiction. They don’t regard the text of the Bible as the final authority, and never have. You seem to have a mistaken belief that they do.
Don’t confuse all Christians with American evangelical fundamentalists.
But this makes it sounds like Fundamentalists are the only people who take the Bible seriously, while mainlines feel free to just disregard anything they don’t like.
On the contrary, among both Evangelicals and Mainline Protestants, there are those who dig deeper and ask things like “This word that’s translated ‘homosexual’—what did Paul actually mean by that? What situation was he addressing? What point was he making, and how does that apply today?” Which IMHO is taking the Bible more seriously than many Fundamentalist “Biblical literalists” do.
The OP seems to have an underlying concept that ‘believe in God’ actually means “believe in the Christian God as described by a small subset of Christians”. But there’s really no reason to accept the narrow viewpoint as the only valid one, as people in this thread have shown in many ways. Also, I agree with Thudlow that actually examining the Bible and it’s history and translation is taking it more seriously than ‘this word is used in the translation I grew up with and fits what I want to believe, therefore it’s the word of God and unquestionable’. I further think that the idea that there’s an all-powerful, all-knowing being who created all of the beautiful complexity of the cosmos and set in motion all of the intricate physical laws and conditions that led to life and that he tacked ‘But no homo, lol’ on at some point is a bit silly.
I would say that they are the only ones who take it literally. I think that all of us take it seriously.
For instance, a fundamentalist would look at Genesis and say ‘The Bible tells us that God made the world in six days and they ate a fruit and now we die.’ A mainline would probably ask what exactly the story is conveying to us about God and humanity. We might say that we see evidence of a God who is concerned about his creation, who finds it to be a beautiful and good thing. We might say that humanity is inherently inclined to selfishness and that there is a gulf between our own fallibility and the perfection that God desires for us. We’re not saying that the story is unserious, but rather the way that we approach the story is quite different. Fundamentalists see it as a history lesson and mainlines see it as a parable.
I would liken it to how we approach any reading. Right now I’m reading the Brothers Karamazov for like the 50th time. I could approach the book as a history lesson on Russian inheritance laws regarding children and their relationship to local institutions. That’s certainly one way to read it, but I would claim that only an ignoramus would do so. I would claim that it is really a book about human nature and freedom and existential crisis and dealing with the nature of God and man. I would claim that the second interpretation is the far more serious one even though it is the much less literal one.
Similarly, I would claim that a fundamentalist, literal interpretation is far less serious than trying to actually delve into the text and elucidate what it’s telling us about the nature of God and man.
I think that might be where you’re trying to go as well, but I want it said that I never said that the Bible was unimportant to mainline Protestants, only that it’s not viewed as the only important thing and that many other things go into our understanding of God rather than just the Bible.