Says you. This is hardly a universal definition.
If you treat each person you meet in life as if that person was the living child of God, but do not know the truth of scripture, or know Christ Himself, you will receive the same love that you showed to “the least of His children.” No one else’s opinion is of any importance, not even your own. Love is the answer to your question. What your question was more or less irrelevant. Faith, hope and love abide, these three, and the the greatest of these is love.
Believing that Jesus is the son of God and that he came to Earth to offer salvation to all who would believe in him is pretty much the whole point to Christianity. If there’s one thing you need to believe to be a Christian, that’s it.
It makes no sense to call yourself ‘Christian’ if you don’t believe that Jesus was the Messiah. It’s pretty much the defining characteristic of the religion.
If you just like Jesus’ teaching but think the bible is just a good story with some good moral rules, and you live your life by them, you’re still not a Christian. You’re simply a person with an ethical code you got from a book.
I try to live my life by mostly Christian principles, because I think that they are pretty good rules overall. I used to be a Christian when I was a child. I am most definitely NOT one now - and I even think Jesus the man probably existed. But I lack the key requirement - the belief in Jesus as the literal Son of God and Messiah. Since I don’t believe in the supernatural, I can’t be a Christian no matter how much I like the trappings of the church, the community, or the message.
The forgiveness of Jesus as the ticket into Heaven is the cornerstone of Christianity, it’s the very foundation. As I said, people can call themselves Christian all they want without bothering with all of the tenets and such.
I agree and don’t understand the contrary point. If the idea is that if I want to call myself the Lord Protectorate of the SDMB and I am not harming anyone and if it is no skin off of anyone’s nose that I’m doing it the have at it, then I guess I am okay with that philosophy, but it’s not correct.
This isn’t some intersectional rivalry about who is a “true” Christian. The very definition of the word, at minimum, requires a supernatural belief of a resurrection and a path to everlasting life through some person/God/entity called Jesus Christ. Religion requires a supernatural belief.
If I read a Jimmy Buffett book and decide to live the life of a beach bum, I don’t think that under any definition of the word we call that a religion, no matter how much I drank. Some people may sarcastically say that you are treating a hobby or belief like a religion, e.g., “Gee, that guy must worship Bernie Sanders!” or “His church is on a golf course” but it is sarcasm.
All depends on how you read the bible, I see Jesus’s message as moving from selfish love to selfless love at it’s core.
I now call myself a cultural Christian, this means whilst I think that the magic stuff in the Bible is tosh and still can accept that it has shaped how the west behaves.
Well, maybe. But if it is not true, the sacrifice of his life (or his lost holiday weekend, whatever you prefer) was rather pointless.
Person A: All honor to our hero, who gave his life smashing open the door to the house to rescue the residents.
Person B: Hate to tell you, but the side door was unlocked and they all could have left that way.
The higher-level question is: does whether or not you are a Christian depend on:
- what you believe?
- what moral/ethical rules you (try to) live by?
- what ceremonial rules and rituals you observe?
- what you identify as?
- membership and/or participation in a particular group?
- something else?
- more than one of these in combination?
And does the same answer apply to other religions, or does it vary from religion to religion?
I would answer that last (unnumbered) question by saying that it does vary from religion to religion. Christianity practically invented the idea of religion as a belief (as opposed to religion as a set of practices); look at the origins of the words dogma and orthodoxy, or creed. Christians have seen the idea of proclaiming a creed, a statement of belief, as fundamental for well over a thousand years, and perhaps from the very beginning. The idea of religion as belief has deep roots in the New Testament: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16) [Emphasis added.]
And of course Christianity practically invented the idea of quarreling over (and, eventually, killing each other over) differences of belief and doctrine: Trinitarianism and non-Trinitarianism; monophysitism and miaphysitism and dyophysitism; homoousionism and homoiousianism. Christians have been getting angry at each other (sometimes violently so) over very abstract issues of belief for a very long time.
There isn’t too much that is unique about Jesus’s teachings without at least the idea that there was a Jesus who said them. So I wouldn’t see the point in being a Christian who didn’t believe in the existence of Jesus. Why wouldn’t you pick some other term that describes the actual core of your beliefs?
At least, not unless it’s more a cultural or social Christianity more than a belief system. The question only makes sense, however, as a question about belief systems, since it talks about belief in Jesus’s existence as a possible requirement. So I ignore that type of “Christianity” without judgement.
I need to tread lightly here. According to Paul, who, it is my understanding, pretty much invented Christianity, you have to accept the resurrection as FACT to be a Christian. But that’s pretty much all that is necessary: not baptism, “rebirth,” a personal relationship with Jesus, or anything else. I have not read the gospels and epistles in a long time, so I could be misremembering, but I don’t expect they have changed.
About 75% of that could apply to many Jews. “Encouraging others to read the NT,” obviously not, but many Jews believe that Jesus is a myth or legend who is a sort of composite character of various 1st-50th CE preachers, with a little bit of different messianic-type legends, and different “rebirth of gods” legends from other religions (particularly Egyptian and Mythraic traditions thrown in-- there is another very closely parallel story of a crucified and reborn leader from about 50 BCE of another faith, and the community of Zealots have a story of a crucified leader named Jehoshua, albeit, he was not resurrected, and what his crime was is unknown, but he was “nailed to a tree”); and more importantly for Jews, Jesus’ teachings are clearly the school of Hillel. There is nothing startling or original in Jesus teachings to a Jew schooled in early proto-rabbinic commentary.
I even know a few Jews who regard the gospel of Matthew as important to Jewish history (but not Jewish theology) in that it represents the thinking of a Hellenistic Jews around the year 200. They clearly regard “Matthew” (whatever his real name was) as a real person, interpolations notwithstanding, a Jew, and an historically important one. Paul was too, albeit, a bit of a loon.
As far as I know, you’re mostly right about what you say. And I think many people’s exposure to Christianity misleads them to think that religions in general are primarily defined by what their adherents believe.
The part I take issue with is your quote of John 3:16 in support. I don’t know that “believing in” someone is the same thing as “believing” something. Is it even the same word in the original Greek?
Paul Did Not ‘Invent’ Christianity
The closest thing to this that I can remember/find is 1 Corinthians 15. Although what he’s saying there sounds more to me like “if you don’t accept the resurrection as fact, the whole Christian gospel falls apart” rather than “if you don’t accept the resurrection as fact, you can’t be considered a Christian,” if that’s a distinction that matters. I don’t know of anywhere that Paul uses the word “Christian” or tries to define what a Christian is.
Mr X reminds me of Thomas Jefferson, who thought that belief in the divinity of Jesus was ridiculous but nonetheless admired his teachings, to the point of rewriting the Bible.
No? I’m Lutheran and Catholics are obviously Christians. Jews, however, are not, nor do they claim to be, as they don’t believe Jesus as a Savior.
Note that believing someone is Christian doesn’t automatically make them a good person in my eyes. The Westboro Baptists are “Christian”, yet they’re disgusting, sick individuals who use their faith to hurt others.
I’m not a scholar of New Testament Greek (or any other form of Greek, for that matter) but the verb πιστεύω that’s translated as “believe in” in John 3:16 seems to have pretty much the same range of meanings as the English word “believe”. That includes James 2:19, “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble” (or, in the NIV: “You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder”), where πιστεύω is used to just mean “know the truth of” without any overtone of “trust in”: Even demons believe [πιστεύω] that God exists (in the same way that the Nazis “believed in” the Red Army and the Eighth Air Force–they could hardly deny their existence).
In English, of course, we use the same word for the assertion of the truth of something with a wide variety of different degrees of confidence and nuances of meaning:
“I believe it!”
“I believe you.”
“I wouldn’t have believed it for myself if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.”
“I believe it to be the case, but I can’t prove it.”
And also to mean something more like “trust in someone”: “You’re going to go far! I believe in you!”
I don’t see why New Testament Greek words would necessarily be any more unambiguous than English ones.
I’m a little surprised at your surprise. A significant portion of evangelicals have a black and white view of these things- you’re either on *their *god-train or you’re on worshiping Satan.
Do I think Jesus really existed? Of course. But there is no independent source outside of the Bible that says he rose from the dead. You think somebody might have noticed and wrote it down.
And Paul’s views on women would keep me from ever being a Christian, but that’s another story.
Do you have to think Paul is real to be a Christian?
And the sources in the bible disagree. I am amazed at the number of Christians that don’t even know what the synoptic gospels are, let alone have read them critically.