Here and in other threads, I’m reading that my understanding of what a Christian is, is apparently flawed.
While I know there’s a lot of debate about the topic over the centuries, I thought the bottom-line, absolute minimum starting point was John 3:16. For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.
I thought that was the coarse filter-if you don’t believe at least that much, there’s no point in discussing anything further: you’re not a Christian if you don’t accept that sentence. Other stuff is debatable (see some Christian’s attacks on Mormonism, for example) but that verse is not.
Now I’m reading that there are Christians who don’t believe that Christ was the only begotten Son of God. That there are Christians who don’t believe in God-The-Father. That there are Christians who don’t even believe Christ was divine.
So…does the term have any meaning? There’s a general consensus about what Muslim means. About what Buddhist means. About (despite the efforts of some) what Jew means. Does the term “Christian” really have no meaning?
I’m pretty much in the same boat as you. If Christ wasn’t divine then he was just some lunatic running around telling people not to sin, spitting in their eyes, amd having prostitutes wash his feet. Also, the New Testament is pretty specific in that there are only a few ways to get into the afterlife. You gotta believe in Jesus, you gotta follow the 10 Commandments, and, in the words of Jesus, you should also eschew wealth.
Odesio
I have found the same thing. It seems that the term Christian has been used to cover many things that don’t seem to fit. I do believe John 3:16 and therefor call myself a believer in Christ.
I don’t belong to an organized religion. I just pray, read the Bible and depend on the Holy Spirit for guidance, which seems to come in an intuitive form. Sometimes it’s a premonition or an answer to a question or a warning. I have learned to heed the warnings.
I have had prayers answered many times, even prayers about seemingly insignificant things. I have learned that God is trustworthy and that He is always with me even when I cannot feel it.
I recently read a book called “The Shack” which has made a deep impression. You might want to check it out.
The minima, abstracted from various places in the New Testament:
The absolute minimal definition is in Paul’s Letter to the Romans, IIRC chapter 10: “If you believe in your heart that Jesus is Lord, and confess with your lips that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Please note that this does not mandate a zombie-like revivification of a dead body per se. While some “Bible-believing Christians” hold to this take, following the “see the wounds in my hands and side” passages, Paul himself (in I Corinthians 15) rejects it. Simply acknowledging that something unprecedented happened on the first Easter that led people who had known Jesus and were aware he’d been crucified to death to think that “he’s back”. (I’m wryly amused that it’s the groups that have issues with one using one’s brain that hold to the Night of the Undead Messiah interpretation).
“If you love me, keep My commandments.” This usually leads into a turf war about exactly what “my commandments” includes and does not incldue – but the basic principle holds.
Repent – which means turning to Christ and being willing to be reshaped by Him, not necessarily giving up any particular ‘sinful’ behavior – and be baptized. The meaning and intent of baptism, the proper way to do it, its effects if any, and whether it is properly repeated if one was baptized as an infant, are again debated – the principle, undergo baptism if you haven’t already been baptized, is not.
In general, Nicene Christians, the overwhelming majority of those who identify as Christians, hold to a Trinitarian God which includes Jesus as truly God and truly man. Certainly anyone taking Jesus as Lord who does not hold to Trinitarian theology could and do consider themselves Christians. (Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses have some interesting takes on this, which I’ll leave to one of them to explain.)
In the broadest sense, all Christianity means is a set of beliefs/philosophies descended from a particular group of people around Jerusalem around 2009 years ago.
Including all the Gnostic and philosophic branches and you’ve got everything from God is good, to God is the source of evil in the world, to there ain’t no God. Until some greater power come down and clear things up, as soon as anyone calls himself a Christian, you’ve got another branch that may or may not have much of anything to do with anything that went before it.
Mormons and Muslims could be titled Christians very easily, it should be pointed out. They both consider themselves to be following Jesus.
Of course the term “Christian” has meaning. At the very least it means a person who calls himself one. For example, he does not believe, but goes to church for the socialization. Or he goes to church in order to get elected president. Yet, whatever the specifics are of his belief, they can be used to deny the title to him by any number of other Christians. That is fairly common. Early Christianity was fraught with major differences on what appears now as fundamental tenets of the religion. It was only later when Christianity got organized was there an attempt to provide a litmus test. The belief in a trinity for one.
I do not agree that there is a general consensus on what Jew means. I’ve been around a long long time and have always thought that a Jew was primarily defined by his ethnicity. Hitler appears to have had that idea. If it was defined by religion, Why then are there atheist Jews ?
I do appreciate the re-education regarding what it means to be a Jew. You guys have something really special and I respect your right to keep it that way.
So anyone can call themselves a Christian and be equally valid in that claim? Someone can be born a Muslim, believe that Christ was a human, heck a human who ran a scam operation and lusted for power but was put down by intervention from beneficient aliens who have been looking over us since the dawn of time, and if he or she calls himself a Christian, well dabnabit that’s what he or she is?
Beyond that and in the interest of keeping discussion focused - I believe the op is asking about what someone calls him or herself from a religious belief perspective. Being born of Christian parents, or having no religious belief at all but enjoying the trappings of Christmas and Easter or even the social life of Church attendence is not the issue here any more than it was the critical point in this thread’s progenitor about Jewish identity.
"Christian"is a much looser term than “Jew” which I’ve learned is highly restrictive. We’ve never had a debate here on who is a Christian or not, that I can recall. (The Jews for Jesus thing has come up often enough)
Some say you must be born again to be Christian.
Some say that you must be baptized as a result of your will.
Some say you just need to get sprinkled
Some say all you need is to accept Jesus.
Some say you need to believe in the trinity as if anyone really understands the concept.
Some say you don’t
Some say you need to take the bible literally
and so on
If Fenris wants to adopt some rigorous criteria to define a Christian, I really don’t care what he comes up with. I just don’t see a consensus among those who define themselves as Christian.
My attititude stems from a somewhat earlier imposed Calvinist attitude that would deny the label “Christian” to most Christians, an attitude I now find deplorable.
Yes, it was an obviously absurd hypothetical to illustrate what absurdity your proffered definition implies: any one can call themselves a Christian and you would say okay. There has to be more to it than that or my absurd example would hold true. So what more is it? Is it an acceptance of Christ’s divinity or not?
A Christian is someone who follows the teachings of Christ as he best understands them. Unfortunately, these teachings get rewritten every so often, usually to legitimize the authority of a Constantine or a King James, and a lot gets attributed to Christ that he couldn’t possibly have said, so we choose the teachings selectively. Long story short, lots of Christians don’t recognize each other as “real.”
If that were the case, we would have to exclude Jehovah Witnesses who believe that Jesus, once an archangel was a created being.
I find the OP’s question somewhat absurd. We can debate all night long on whether JWs are Christian or not, but in the end the definition is based on arbitrarily selected criteria.
I don’t identify as Christian for some of the reasons noted in this thread. I have no use for John 3:16 (what is this “only begotten” blithering, all people are children of god!)…
If instead we started with the Sermon on the Plain and the Sermon on the Mount and asked “would you get behind that as a party platform?” I’d say absolutely, count me in.
But for centuries (millennia at this point) “being a Christian” has revolved around practices and spiritual beliefs that seem to be to have been tacked on (I don’t “get” these things from a casual read of what Jesus of N himself said) — that Jesus is to be worshiped, that he rose from the dead (and that that matters somehow for some reason), that it is Very Important to get everyone else to acknowledge the truth of these things (“believeth in him” and all that).
If those were matters mostly only discussed in the dusty corridors of graduate departments of theology and in seminaries, and the everyday mainstream emphasis was on sharing, forgiving, refraining from judging & punishing people, and so forth, I could ignore the former and identify as “Christian with some differences of opinion with some of its scholars” or some such, but it is very much a religion in which if you do not believe Jesus is God in a sense that no other person is, believe him to be currently alive, pray to him and worship him, and get behind the effort to get everyone else on board with that, you do not belong on their bus.
Besides, as has been pointed out in myriad debate threads with atheists, even my claims to be theistic are subject to quite a bit of dubiety. And a belief not only in God but in God as widely construed (a sort of Action Comics figure) is also a pretty big part of the “Christian” picture.
Yeah, that’s always been my personal take on him, that latter part. But I knew an American here once who tried to get me to believe anyone could officially be deemed a Christian just if they were nice to other people.
Of course, he also ended up in a psychiatric ward eventually, too. Really.
I don’t know whether he was divine or not, but here’s another possibility: No prior Western holy man had ever linked treating your fellow men (all of them, not just fellow tribesmen) decently with finding God’s favor or personal moral virtue. Pagans viewed their gods as remote and unconcerned with mortal affairs, and Jews of that era felt that if you obeyed the letter of the law, you were good and had license to, I dunno, cheat your brother out of his birthright for a mess of pottage or stone prostitutes and adultresses for all God cares. Christ was the first (at least in the greater Mediterranean region) to say no, that’s not enough, you have to treat others as you would be treated, or the rituals and incantations are meaningless.
He gained a following, he was killed for his efforts, and his associates and their successors made wild claims about him afterwards (that he performed miracles, claimed divinity, his mother was a virgin and he rose from the dead, etc.).
Even if he wasn’t divine and some later claims about him were exaggerated, that doesn’t take away his significance as the most important religious figure in history. Plus, if he wasn’t divine, we’re robbed of an excuse for not emulating his character. My humble impression is that he intended people to follow his example, not stand back in awe of it. But, lacking an ungarbled account of his exact words, I’m just guessing.
It means different things which is why it is almost meaningless. People who define themselves as Christian are in danger of thinking they are saved but don’t know the Son of God/son of man the person. Mainly it is a group who is looking to be born again but not obtaining that stage yet. Many are bound by the written code i.e. tithing, instead of giving everything (100%) to God and letting Him work through you through His Holy Spirit on a much more intimate/personal level.
There’s a school of belief that Jesus took John the Baptist’s teachings, repackaged it all with himself as the son of God, and sold it like that.
In that case, the religion that everyone intends to be following, but call Christianity, is not the true Christianity. Obviously since the word “Christianity” is specific to Jesus Christ, it’s a bit odd to call Baptist-centrists Christians, but they most likely are a branch of the same tree either way. And, of course, they don’t believe in Christ’s teachings–at least except for where it’s part of the stuff he stole.
Now, I feel that I should say at this point that I haven’t been a Christian for over 25 years now; I’ve been an atheist all that time. But even when I was a Christian, I was having trouble with the divinity of Christ. It never seemed clear to me that Jesus ever said it, or expected people to believe it. As I approached my “conversion,” I began to regard the Bible as a heavily edited text, and concluded that words had been put in Jesus’ mouth. I was also about to reject the Epistles entirely when I finally said, “you know, I don’t need to believe any of this – I’ll stick with physics!” It was around this time that I came up with the expression “Pauline heresy.”
I think you’re half right. The Greek gods of the Iliad certainly took an active interest in the lives of mortals. For example some gods were in favor of Ilium with others being against and there are several instances of the gods rushing in to save their favorite on the field of battle.