That would be the belief in universal salvation, i.e., that hell (be it a place or a state) exists, but that God’s love is so great that nobody has been condemned to hell for eternity.
It’s not a new belief. It’s been around at least since the 14th century, when Julian of Norwich proposed universal salvation (albeit in very oblique, mystical terms).
I think much of the confusion may result from modern people’s improper understanding physical vs. spiritual realities. We have this physical world with three spatial dimensions (plus maybe some very small extras) and one time dimension containing various particles and some energy. As many people have convinced themselves that this is the only reality, they come to view any claim of a “spiritual realm” as something of a dodge, something that gets made abstract as a means of avoiding discussion or escaping unwanted conclusions. Yet that is absolutely not the case, and certainly not how most people would understand it for most of history. The spiritual realm was very real, and to say that hell was a spiritual state of separation from God–as Pope John Paul II did–was not a dodge at all.
Hence, if you’re looking at something life Dante’s Inferno, you should not take it as a literal, physical attempt to describe Hell, but at the same time you should not dismiss it by thinking that Dante thought of Hell as unreal. The narrator’s journey through Hell in the Inferno is intended to represent a spiritual journey. It is the process of recognition of sin, the first step of living the godly life. (After that comes Purgatory, the conquest of sin, and then Paradise, the triumph over sin.) So the torments that Dante’s envisions for souls in Hell are metaphorical but very real, as this wonderful essay explains. The same would be true for other portraits of Hell, as for instance in Chesterton’s The Aristocrat:
That’s an obvious metaphorical treatment. It says that those who are distracted by wealth and spectacle and lured away from their focus on God eventually come to regret it, because the pleasures that they sought end up destroying them. One could read any number of specifics into it from drugs to sex to taking bribes, but in any case the condition described is very real to the souls who are caught up in it, both before and after death.
Dense, but everything there. In any case, I think what he was saying was that non-belief in hell puts one outside the historical mainstream of Christianity - which is not to say outside of Christianity itself. The mainstream might be moving away from hell - in the US, at least, I’m not sure about the rest of the world. If that is true, then, to paraphrase Mr. Dooley, it shows that Christians may or may not follow the Bible, but their leaders follow poll results.
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Doesn’t that make the sacrifice of Jesus rather pointless? Not to mention missionary work. I’m not asking you to defend this, of course, but it seems to me this is yet another example of someone not being able to stand what is written in the Bible inventing a theology to make the Bible morally acceptable. When Shaw wrote about hell, with its revolving door allowing free movement between it and heaven, he was writing a comedy.
Sort of. It’s just that, as a descriptivist, I pay attention to how words are actually used rather than how “authorities” tell us to use them. I don’t think anyone has trademarked the term “Christian,” and I think it’s traditionally used to cover people who don’t abide by the core teachings of Jesus (e.g., the sermon on the Mount), so I think it makes most sense to treat it like race, and have it be a self-identification term rather than a set of criteria. We can then observe who declares themselves to be Christian and make conclusions and generalizations based on that self-identification.
Seems like you’re a descriptivist in the Humpty Dumpty school of thought – those words mean what I mean them to! 
More seriously, I don’t see how you can make any conclusions or generalizations on what a Christian is if literally anyone who calls themself a Christian is a Christian.
Someone who doesn’t accept the divinity of Christ or that Christ died for your sins doesn’t seem like much of a Christian to me. Likewise, per the OP, someone who directly contradicts Christ about the existence (on our realm or the spiritual realm) of Hell, and basically goes against what Christians at the time thought, and most Christians throught history thought, doesn’t seem very Christian to me either.
Race is really a squishy concept and not backed up much by genetics (other than for some very broad claims), so I can see how self-identification makes sense there. There is literally (that I can think of) nothing that could be applied to every member of a race.
Is there no basic concept, none, that Christians all agree on? How bizarre.
Not remotely. Are you serious, that this is the best you can summarize my argument?
What about someone who goes against Jesus’s most basic teachings? Yet there are plenty of people who call themselves Christian who cast the first stone, who fail to turn the other cheek, who do not forgive their enemies. Do you refuse to call these people Christian?
What if they don’t merely screw up, but they actively argue against the type of behavior that Jesus encouraged?
I tend to think that someone who believes that Jesus was the best teacher is a Christian, even if they’re a total moron when it comes to the content of those teachings. I’ve never encountered anyone who genuinely claimed to be a Christian but who thought that there were better spiritual teachers out there. That’s the commonality I find.
I don’t know. I’m not enough of an apologist to defend the idea. I suppose some defenders might say that the sacrifice of Jesus made universal salvation possible. As to missionary work, it could be said that one should live a Christian life because it is good in and of itself, rather than to avoid eternal punishment.
And the Catholic Church was never that big on Biblical literalism. They’d probably say they’ve been around longer than the Bible anyway.
Which implies non-Christian lives aren’t good in some way. I’m not aware of missionaries turning around and going home when the people they visit are living a moral life. My understanding is that even those who are good need to be saved.
Of course they’re not literalists, but there has to be some core of the Bible which any Christian thinks is true. One could say that the miracles were just stories and there’d be no problems, but if anyone says Jesus was not crucified, but died by being run over by a chariot, and did not rise, I’d say their Christianity should be called into question.
I’m not and never have been Christian, and the reason I know that is that I have never believed Jesus to be divine and have never believed he got resurrected.
Nonsense - he’s not trying to tell people to use his personal criteria to apply the label - you are. He’s saying that if a person calls themself a Christian, there is no one authoritative to go to unambiguously determine whether they qualify for the label. You are declaring that you are the authoritative source, in that you claim to be able to declare that a person is not a Christian, even if they say they are. If somebody’s Humpty here, it’s you.
More seriously, it’s a simple fact that acting unchristlike doesn’t make you not a Christian; it makes you a bad Christian. Or a hypocritical Christian. But it doesn’t make you not a christian.
Fortunately for those of us who like to make sweeping broad generalizions about things, there is a fair amount of concensus amongst self-declared christians - enough so that there are in fact certain statements that you can make about them and not be called on it except by pedants. That they believe in a single primary God. That they believe that Jesus isn’t a fictional character, but instead actually existed. That this Jesus guy was a wandering minister who got crucified in his thirties. Sure, there may be the occasional guy out there who self-identifies as Christian and doesn’t believe some of that, but he’s so outnumbered that we can mostly pretend he doesn’t exist. (This can be a little tough if he’s right there debating against you, but we persevere. )
And there are still further things that enough christians believe in that you can usually make claims about them and get a pass from the audience. That there will be a judgement. That Jesus and/or God think that people should be nice and/or obedient to him. That there is a place of punishment. That Jesus had some sort of special connection with God. That Jesus was a bearded man with his hair parted in the middle and who was white as the whitest caucasian. (Okay, maybe not the last. Maybe.)
Regardless, it’s pointless and downright foolish to draw up an arbitrary list of criterion determining what ‘defines’ a Christian, with the intent to include or exlcude people from meriting the label based on whether they meet your qualifications. And what makes it pointless and foolish is that the word isn’t yours to define. It’s been around for a while, and in actual practice it’s been legitimately applied to nearly every sort of person under the sun. Denying that is just that; denial.
Great - you just defined most Jews and Muslims as Christian. Cargo cultists too as far as I know. Your definition here pretty much includes all monotheists who aren’t skeptical of the existence of Jesus as a person. I really think you guys are not protecting Christianity from being overly exclusive, you’re trivializing it.
Don’t be silly. He didn’t define Christianity that way. Those are characteristics of most Christians. If I were to define “Christianity” (and I think begbert would agree with me here) it would be as “the religion of Christians.” “Christians” in turn is defined as the set of people who identify themselves as such. Jews and Muslims don’t identify themselves as Christians. If I say “Humans have hair and move about on two legs” have I just defined kangaroos as human? Have I trivialized humanity?
Bingo. The true defining property of a Christian is “somebody who defines themselves as a Christian”. The term simply doesn’t have any other property that can be clearly used to divide people as being in the group or without it - mostly because there is no overriding authority to lend credibility to any specific criterion, and so all the people who have been calling themselves Christians for hundreds of years despite having widely divergent opinions and properties have effectively torn out any other defining criteria the word may have once had. There may have once been a time when “Christian” meant something more specific, but that time is long past and cannot be reclaimed.
And the notion that saying “All (or most) people in set A have property B” implies that I’m saying that “All (or most) people that have property B are in set A”, that’s a pretty obvious logical fallacy. I mean, I can say that all Christians are humans, too, but that’s clearly not the same as saying that all humans are Christians.
Again, the other characteristic that appears universal among, and unique to, Christians is the belief that Jesus is the greatest spiritual teacher in history, and that the speaker believes in following Jesus’s teachings. I am unaware of anyone who holds these beliefs who does not identify as Christian; I am unaware of anyone who identifies as Christian who does not hold these beliefs. (Note that Fred Phelps and others are absolute rubbish at actually following Jesus’s teachings–I phrased it carefully such that Phelps is included).
Is anyone aware of exceptions to this pattern? Certainly it’s far more universal among Christians than belief in hell, belief in turning the other cheek, or even belief in Jesus’s resurrection.
I would say yes also but there is a fundamental problem with Christianity. The word HELL isn’t in the Bible.
It is the word SHEOL in the Old Testament and the word HADES in the New Testament that are translated as Hell. Along with Gehenna.
But the translations are wrong. Hades is from Greek mythology and everybody went there. There was no separate Heaven. According to Cruden’s Concordance sheol and hades may actually have similar meanings.
The Catholic Church has been teaching heresy for centuries. LOL
That is one of the curious things about this culture. Unless you are one of those Christians that uses a Bible that has Sheol instead of Hell in the Old Testament you can live your entire life and never encounter the word. It is really very odd.
http://what-the-hell-is-hell.com/HellStudy/HellCharts.htm
http://heinleinsociety.org/concordance/real/s_real.htm
psik
What? Jesus didn’t speak English? These handwritten scrolls had to be translated from one language to another and then another and then revised again and again? What happened to the notes taken down at the time he said these words? You think maybe sometimes nobody took notes?
Some Christians believe that the Bible is one way, but not the only way to to be guided spiritually.
I don’t. I did have a professor in college who considered himself both Buddhist and Christian. He would maybe say that no teacher is greater than Jesus without saying that Jesus is uniquely the greatest. Then again, he might say nothing of the sort. I’m also not sure that he would describe himself as Christian without some qualifier. Anyway, it’s a better universal and unique descriptive characteristic of Christianity than I would previously have thought possible.
I think belief in the divinity of Jesus characterizes most Christians also, and it is far more useful because it is the thing that distinguishes Christians from other religions. Why is it that Jews and Muslims don’t define themselves as Christian? Hint: it is not an allergy to crosses.
Limiting the definition of group X as those who call themselves members of Group X is fairly useless in assigning common characteristics to the group - besides membership that is. Sure there are exceptions like the atheist bishops, but belief in the divinity of Jesus is a pretty good determinant of Christianity.
If you say that you can distinguish members of group A by property X, the fact that many or most people not in group A also have property X means it is poor distinguishing factor. I’m not sure I totally agree that LHoD’s is a perfect criterion, but it is a far better one than yours. (I’m also not sure I disagree with it, just to be clear.)
I think it is fair to call people who believe that Jesus was the greatest spiritual leader Christians, as you’d call those who think this of Socrates Socratics. But is this group really the same as the religious ones? They would think this because of a study of the teachings of Jesus, while the others would think it is true by definition because of the godhood and perfection of Jesus. I think one could probably give the first logical arguments why Jesus teachings were deficient, while you couldn’t do this for the second group. The first set represents a school of philosophy, while the second set represents a religion.
Now, if the first set thinks the superiority of the teachings of Jesus comes from revelation, they are more of a religion also.