Yeah, but we’re not talking about a can or can’t here. It’s more of a do or don’t–one can do something without realizing they’re doing it.
Let’s try this: is it possible to speak of God, faith, and following Jesus without being preachy?
'Tall depends on what you mean by “being preachy”. 
Lute, my email is in my profile if you want to discuss this. Or it can stay on the Dope if you prefer.
I think so but many people are uncomfortable with it. To me the key is to respect others rights to choose what they believe. Have a discussion which is an exchange of ideas and points of views without trying to be “right” or convert anyone. In this area especially we must realize that there’s a whole lot we don’t know.
Preachy. You know, excessive moralizing–I’ll leave it to you to decide what is “excessive”.
Where I go, they mostly manage without a lot of moralizing. But congregations and ministers do vary, I agree. And I suppose a certain amount of moralizing is inevitable if you’re to pay serious attention to the First Commandment (of the two mentioned above).
C S Lewis (here I go again) drew an analogy with the conduct of ships in a convoy. It’s the captain’s business to keep the ship in good running order, and also to maintain the correct separation from the other ships in the convoy. That’s sort of like the relationship between internal morality, the love of God, and ethics, or whatever’s a good term to apply to your relationship with your fellow-men. (And of course the two have a degree of mutual dependence. As Lewis goes on to extend the analogy, if you don’t keep the ship in good running order then you’ll find it hard to keep your proper station. Equally, if sloppy helmsmanship causes you to collide with another ship, you won’t keep your ship intact for very long.)
Which is how we ended up here…in this thread I had been trying to draw a distinction between preachy and preachy but something went wrong.
Interesting.
I think Cultural Christian is a pretty useful and valid term. I still don’t understand what you see as the difference between preachy and preachy.
Can you elaborate?
Can you give an example of something that is “culturally Christian” which is distinct from any sort of religious belief or practice?
I’m not as well-versed in Christian history as the other posters in this thread, but I would hesitate to claim that a Christian has to accept the Nicene Creed of 325 (or 381? I’m getting mixed up in my dates here). What would you call the followers of Christ before 325 then?
My definition would include the following:
necessary conditions
- a belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ
- a belief that Jesus Christ was the son of God or a prophet of God (including this as defence to Unitarian Christians, who do not believe that Jesus is God, IIRC - but then do they believe in the resurrection?)
- a belief that the gospels accurately display the life of Jesus
other conditions (that I would think are necessary, but I’m willing to be convinced otherwise)
- a belief that the whole New Testament is a work inspired by God
- a belief that Jesus is the Messiah as predicted in the Old Testament
For the record, I’ve spoken of God, faith, and following Jesus here at length for seven years now. I suspect at times I’ve “gotten preachy.” But I’d welcome feedback from some longtime Dopers on whether in general I’ve avoided it.
Interesting question, Arnold.
Let me trot out some comments relative to it:
- Many Unitarians do not consider themselves Christian, but some do. There are also a number of individuals and a few small denominations who do not ascribe deity or divinity to Jesus. There are also the “Oneness Pentecostals” who do not subscribe to the Trinity. (Plus the LDS, whose stance on the whole issue is significantly askew from the basic question to warrant separate posts, ideally by a LDS Doper).
- Belief in some life-changing event associated with encountering Jesus after the Crucifixion, yes. Many liberal theologians and not a few devout Christians hold this to have been a spiritual event, an encounter with Christ’s living Spirit after His bodily death, and not a bodily Resurrection per se.
- See Dex and Euty’s magnum opus with regard to the Gospels – it is not a contradiction in terms to believe that the Gospels as we have them are slanted, edited portraits which are not verbatim reportage, and that they nonetheless give a clear picture of Jesus and His teachings. (To draw a parallel, does it matter whether it was in a campaign speech or his inaugural address that FDR said “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”? If a post focused on the attitude change he invoked among people chronically depressed by the Depression misattributes it to the wrong speech, does that alter the purport of the post?)
- Exactly what “inspired” means in the context of God’s influence on Scripture is hotly disputed among Christians.
- Jesus was not what was expected by way of a Messiah among the Jews; that is made most clear by the discussions here by scholarly Jews as to what the Messiah was expected to be and do. Nonetheless, He was accepted as the Messiah by a large minority among Jews at the time of His ministry and in the years between His death and the Jewish Revolt. It’s the general consensus of Christians of every stripe that He was what God intended as Messiah – regardless of what the Jews expected.
- The overwhelming majority of Christians – Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Copt, Armenian, Ethiopian, Anglican – accept adherence to the Nicene Creed or the content thereof as the defining character of what it means to be an orthodox Christian. (Some churches are vehemently anti-creedal, but teach beliefs from Scripture that are the precise equivalent of the content of the Creed.) Among many of us, this does not mean that someone who claims to follow Jesus but does not adhere to all the creedal statements is not a Christian. Rather, he’s a Christian who is wrong in some tenets of his beliefs. And we are much more interested in seeing him in a relationship with Jesus and striving to follow Him than in nailing him down on orthodoxy of dogma.
Does that help?
Any sort? No. Is someone Jewish without any sort of religious belief?
Perhaps I am preachy. I don’t try to be.
I think excessive moralizing start when you make judgements about other peoples moral worth, rather than your own.
Just learning how to be a Christian myself is fairly tough. I would not want the responsibility of teaching someone else the “right” way to do it.
However, I feel it is important to add that I am not a Christian because I think I am good at it. I am a Christian because I need the love of Christ. Everything else comes in last.
Tris
As I see it if one calls themselves Christian then we should respect their title.
The majority people in this country call themselves Christian, but considering what goes on in this country it seems like very few follow what they say they believe. There is more crime,we need more jails than ever before in History, I realize there are more people but the percentage is great.Most of the people in jail are not athiests so they have a prison chaplain.
There are some if they had their way would turn this government into a Christian Taliban type government.As I read this morning it sounds like the State of Texas intend to try just that!
We need more of Polycarp like Christians who believe the message of Jesus and seems to apply it in his life. Jesus didn’t go over to peoples houses and preach, He made himself available and let people come to him.
Monavis
Is it confession time for the theists?
Okay, I am preachy. Sometimes I try to curb that tendancy and reign it in. Other times I just let it roll. I am not a many of few words but rather a man of too many.
Ah well… I’m working on it.
Thank you for the interesting information, as always, Polycarp.
Well, I always excluded from the “Christian” umbrella those groups that did not believe that Jesus Christ was God. But now that I go to a Unitarian Universalist church (so I realize that many UUs do not consider themselves Christian - after all, I’m an atheist myself), I have met people there who have explained to me that Unitarian Christians do not believe in the divinity of Jesus. (I should add, for clarity’s sake, that Unitarians and Unitarian Universalists are two different groups, and I need to read more about the history of this.)
http://www.americanunitarian.org/explanation.htm
ARTICLE VI. JESUS CHRIST
§ 23. All Unitarians believe that Jesus is one mind, one soul, one being, as truly one as we are, and equally distinct from the one God. They believe Jesus to be a created being, finite and not infinite, and therefore below the Supreme Being in his nature and person.
(followed by quotes from the Bible that “prove” their point.)
So, out of deference (not defence like I said in my first post - what was I thinking?) to my fellow congregation members, I will include that in my definition of Christianity.
I agree, that is more or less what I meant - that the gospels accurately reflect the teachings of Jesus Christ, even if every minor detail is not correct.
Now that I didn’t know. I thought that the Eastern Orthodox church split from the Roman Catholic church because of something to do with the Nicene Creed (I vaguely remember adding the words “filioque”, “and to the son”, to some important phrase - correct me if I’m wrong). And I imagined the Copts to be descendants of a group from Northern Africa that would not have been affected by the Nicene Creed at all. I guess it’s back to the books for me.
Yes, of course. By the way, if you’re asking that people perceive you as “preachy”, I don’t, assuming that “preachy” is supposed to be derogatory in some sense.
No such luck. Consider this my sermon on the net.
What is a Christian?
There are two basic yet opposing definitions of christian.
A christian (as defined by the spirit) is one that follows the commandments revealed by jesus a.k.a. the christ.
Note that “believes ~” and “says the words” are not the same as “follows”.
Thou shall not cast stony words and laws against other sinners.
Thou shall know and understand the difference between sin and crime.
A christian (in name only) knows and believes in their own words of bible; yet seems not able to understand or follow such simple commandments from the (holy) spirit. Those that cast their stony words or votes or laws against other sinners may sound to themselves and others as “Christian”. Yet no matter how loud or long or “preachy” they sound, “anti-”christian still seems to ring more true.
Who will follow christ and be his neighbor in heaven?
All that help secure the peaceful quests (jihads) of others; even at cost; no matter the sins. Yet their familiar name might not be christian. They may go by samaritan or muslim or other than christian.
Won’t you be my neighbor?)
ItS
mister r~
From The Lion and the Unicorn, by George Orwell (1941):
If America ever becomes a “post-Christian society” (speed the day!), we will still be a Christian culture in several important respects. Our moral sensiblities, at the core, have been shaped by the Christian tradition.
I know. But what I asked is, are there still any Christian denominations that do not consider Jesus the only son of God, and divine in a way we are not? All Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christians are trinitarian, AFAIK, differing only in fine details. The few surviving Monophysite sects (in Egypt, Ethiopia, etc.) consider Jesus entirely divine with no human nature at all. The Arians died out a long time ago, and even they thought of Jesus as something more than human. (My own church, the [url=]Unitarian Universalist Association, grew out of the Protestant tradition and denied Jesus’ divinity from the start; but nobody, including Unitarians, really thinks of it as a “Christian” church any more.)