This is the typical problem with these threads and people trying to specify Christian beliefs.
E.g., the two posts linking to creeds. Both creeds specify Mary as a virgin. Something a non-trivial number of Christians don’t believe.
Take any “standard” Christian tenet and there’s going to be churches out there that don’t agree with it. The Mormons (which is the starting point of this thread) are notably different in many respects.
So linking to a creed and stating or implying that this is a “must” for a Christian just doesn’t work.
Sort of a nitpick - not believing in the Trinity is not exactly what I was talking about when I mentioned rejecting the Holy Spirit. Rejecting the Holy Spirit is, I believe, what Jesus was talking about when He mentioned that
The Spirit is what calls us to salvation. Obviously people like Abraham and OT figures knew nothing about the Trinitarian formula, but they were saved.
The unforgivable sin is to reject salvation and the forgiveness of sin. I think even Athanasius would agree with that, and his creed isn’t IMO talking about the same thing.
Maybe that’s special pleading. Maybe - as I mentioned, my credentials as a Trinitarian are confused. And I find that the schism between the eastern and western churches was disagreement over whether the Spirit issued from the Father and the Son, or just the Father. I feel the same way about that - [list=A][li]AFAICT, not very far, the eastern church was right, and [*]who cares?[/list][/li]
Are Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons going to hell because they don’t accept the Trinity? You are asking the wrong person - I don’t know, and it is none of my business anyway. God is merciful, and He tempers the wind to the shorn lamb, and the Syrian captain was forgiven for bowing in the house of Rimmon.
Lutherans, or at least this Lutheran, would rather talk about that.
It was covered in an earlier post that there’s no significant or conceptual difference in the Bible in different languages. If you study the Bible in different modern languages that soon becomes apparent. Subtle differences because of the limits in any translation of delivering 100% the exact same idea, but not nearly as significant as one language telling you ‘where Satan came from’ and another not. And it might be too obvious to say, Bible translations in various modern languages are from the original languages (or ones of the oldest surviving texts*) not from English. It’s true some English speaking Protestants treat certain English translations like King James as themselves divinely inspired but that’s not Christianity as a whole.
Which would be in contrast to Mormon writings which were, obviously, originally in English though it’s now a quite international faith. And while language isn’t directly brought up in the question but is another aspect of how someone brought up a Mormon would know it wasn’t necessarily like other nominally Christian sects but might not realize how different the view of things is.
As other Catholics noted, growing up Catholic, after school religious instruction etc, that’s an unusual set of questions, none of them things I remember being emphasized and a strange list for the pressing questions of what Christianity is about. And which I guess might be a combination of both the Taiwanese (~5% Christian country, not sub-1% like Japan but far from Christian plurality South Korea) kids’ question and the Mormon conduit. Also not sure if there’s a good way to communicate the core beliefs of any religion taking too much care to insure everyone knows their ‘lack of interest’ (as in ‘absolute rejection’) in the validity. That can tend to end up focusing on trivialities. I could also see this happening in a cultural milieu in the past in the US in the past, or perhaps still now in places, where a teacher felt they needed to be careful not to ‘inspire’ any student about say Islam or Buddhism while teaching it, so tending to avoid approaching it the way believers see it…and ending up focusing on relative trivialities.
*as in for example whether some Greek New Testament writings are themselves translations of earlier Hebrew/Aramaic texts that no longer exist.
Well, yeah, we don’t even agree on what exactly does it mean to “be a Christian”, much less on the rest. But most of us (and definitely any of us who has lasted more than five minutes in these forums) will recognize this.
I’ve always felt that all of the original references to “the spirit” would greatly benefit from discarding notions of the “Holy Ghost” as trinitarian entity (one of the three “persons”, as the song would have it) and replacing them with “spirit” in the sense of “I don’t think the Supreme Court’s ruling really reflects the spirit of that law as originally intended” or “Samuel Adams and Thomas Paine are among the best examples of the spirit of patriotism that gave rise to the American revolution”.
Thus, paraphrasing Jesus of Naz, “You can make missteps and do misdeeds and be forgiven, but if you don’t tune in with the spirit of what is divine, forgiveness isn’t going to fix your problem”
There’s a distinction here, too, between belief that “Mary was a virgin when Jesus was born” and belief that “Mary was a lifelong virgin.”
Most* of the major Christian faiths believe that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was conceived. Some (particularly Catholics and Orthodox Christians) believe in Mary’s “perpetual virginity” (that is, she remained a virgin her entire life).
Many Protestant denominations don’t believe in Mary’s perpetual virgnity (or don’t care either way), and many believe that Mary and Joseph had children together after Jesus’s birth. However, this isn’t universal among Protestants, and a number of major Protestant figures (including Martin Luther and John Wesley) believed in her perpetual virginity.
there are so many different denominations and traditions, that the number of things which one can say “every Christian believes this” is vanishingly small. I don’t know offhand of denominations who don’t believe that Mary was a virgin when Jesus was born, but if you pointed out to me that there were some, I would not be surprised in the slightest.
First, there’s the question of definition: WTF is a “savior”?
In the Methodist congregations I attended circa 1964-1977, there was almost zero mention of some notion that a Divine Sacrifice was in some sense of the word “necessary” in order for the peoples of the earth to be “saved”. The specialness of Jesus of Nazareth was attested to and taught in these terms:
He was the direct incarnation of God, in some not-terribly-well-explained sense; in essence, while the rest of us have no personal prior existence that predates our birth, Jesus had been God beforehand, and had “come down to be Jesus”;
He brought a message to us, detailed in the Sermon on the Plains and the Sermon on the Mount, to the effect of “be nice to each other; forgive each other, share what you got, don’t judge and punish each other, do unto others as you’d have them do unto you”. This message, being the important word of God, was what made his presence among us important and relevant, and told us what we’re supposed to do from now on
He rose from the dead; and, in doing so, promises us that we can do likewise if we’ll follow him. Within the Methodism with which I was acquainted, the non-eligibility of pre-Jesus humans to also rise from the dead was also not-very-well-explained, nor was there a clearly defined litmus test for who gets to do so now. (As I said before, they were much more comfortable talking about how to be good people in the here-and-now than they were when dwelling on all the magic and miraculous and theological stuff, which seemed to sort of embarrass them).
Notice the lack of any assertion that his death saved us. That was a foreign notion to me. I didn’t encounter head-on the attitude that it’s a really good thing that the crucifixion took place until junior high school, from the enraptured testimony of Christians of a different, far more charismatic order.
I might be stretching things a bit if I’m implying that Methodism didn’t or doesn’t officially embrace any of that, mind you; but it was so totally de-emphasized that I think it’s fair to say there were many people IN the church who had no such belief. What was far more common was the notion that it was a horrifying tragedy that someone had been telling us to treat each other compassionately and our reaction (collectively speaking) had been to nail his sorry ass to a cross, and that it was the juxtaposition of his message and our resultant behavior that should give us all pause, that it was our continuing tendency to be that way that we should seek forgiveness for (and all the personal individuals ways in which we find ourselves like that).
There was definitely some shared sense in which his having had the courage to do this, and to forgive us collectively for killing him, that qualified as “salvation” but this, too, was poorly enunciated and seldom laid out in coherent terms. But there sure as hell wasn’t any cheerful joy that he was crucified, i.e., that this “sacrifice of the worthy lamb” in some magic way accomlished our salvation.
On the other hand, you can consider any belief held by Catholics as “widely held”, even if there’s no other sect that accepts it, given that Catholics are over half of all Christians worldwide.
There were numerous alternative beliefs in early Christianity. But one version was adopted as official, and totally predominated from the 4th century until the Reformation.
That version considers Jesus to be the Saviour, and so too do most Protestant denominations as well. I would guess that 95%+ of Christians today regard Jesus as the Saviour, and higher than that through history.
I’m not sure what AHunter3’s particular Methodist church emphasised, but the official doctrine of the United Methodist Church includes:
Some kind of 80/20 rule has to be applied, among times, sects, size of sects etc. Defining Christianity in present context in terms of (sometimes vaguely known or even unknown) beliefs of ancient sects which no longer exist doesn’t make a lot of sense IMO. I think those beliefs can be neglected outside a specifically historical discussion.
At the other end of the time spectrum I’m thinking some people might be inclined to quibble with “acceptance of Jesus as the Savior” because it sounds like the Evangelical Protestant tenet “acceptance of Jesus as my personal Savior” often said in those words or very similar ones. In Catholicism that’s not a common phrase ‘acceptance as Savior’. Yet Jesus Christ being the Savior of the World is nonetheless central. I think the general idea does actually qualify as a must for Christianity.
It does at least looking from the POV of sects containing the vast majority of current believers as to whether other sects or individuals are Christian. For example when Progressive ‘Christianity’ gets to the point of following ‘Jesus the kindly philosopher’ stripping away any divine or ‘supernatural’ element they are not really Christians anymore according to the great majority of Christians (once that belief or lack of is fully out in the open, it’s sometimes presented rather coyly), beside being a tiny minority.
I have to disagree on that one. Speaking as a catholic-raised atheist, I developed an intelectual interest in theological matters as a way to mock the believers. I found out that the soul is *somehow *made by the souls of the parents at the moment of conception. This is important, because it explains the transmission of the Original Sin. If souls were creared by God directly anew for every new human, just like that, the powerful idea of the Original Sin would not work and the most fearsome weapon of the Pope would be rendered useless.
Official??? Where are you getting this stuff? Christiandom has never been remotely homogeneous, let alone “official”. There were all sorts of sects believing all sorts of variant beliefs calling themselves Christian from the get go until today.
And since when is “predominated” a criteria for specifying other people’s religious beliefs???
How many Holy Wars are you ignoring here? All the Arians and so on?
You were mocking incorrectly. Catholics do not believe in Transducianism (the belief that the soul is a natural phenomenon created via the parents.) though many Lutherans do. Catholics are in fact creationists who believe the soul is created by God at conception. This was expounded by Pius XII in 1950 in his encyclical Humani Generis. Original sin is inherited from the parents as a contagion rather than genetic condition. This actually makes some sense since Mary was conceived immaculately. If original sin were ‘genetic’ how could she have been preserved from it?
