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> What I mean is, Christians don't even agree what the word means. They actually substantially do. There are ~2.2 billion Christians in the world. Of these,

by Dove 10y ago

> What I mean is, Christians don't even agree what the word means. They actually substantially do. There are ~2.2 billion Christians in the world. Of these, about 1.2 billion are Catholic, 0.9 billion are Protestant, and the ~0.2 billion change are Orthodox. Everyone agrees the Catholics are Christian. Pretty much everyone agrees the Orthodox are Christian. Those two groups agree each other are Christian. In Protestantland, things get complicated -- major denominations range from membership in the 85M range to the 40M range, but again, everyone agrees that these major groups are Christian. As the groups get more obscure and more independent, people start to fall back on first principles, but my point is this -- the groups I've named account for something like 98% of the people on the planet who identify as Christian, and they all more or less agree that they all are Christians. With Mormonism, it is different. Mormons say they are Christians, but Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox agree they are not. At 14M believers, they are smaller than the smallest of the major denominations, and certainly don't command the sort of numbers such that voting for themselves significantly changes the percentage of Christians in the world who agree they are Christians. These sorts of things are both communally defined, and reference an objective standard -- and the fact that nobody agrees exactly about what that standard is does not make it subjective. Sounds complicated and confusing? It's really not. You already are familiar with a community that works this way: science. Lots of people in the world claim to believe in science, or even to be scientists. Not all of them are. There is an objective standard of behavior, and even if we don't all agree about exactly what it is, we definitely agree that it's objective, and we agree about who meets it the vast, vast majority of the time. The conspiracy crank on the internet says he is a scientist, and they physicist at a major university says he definitely is not. The outsider might just throw up his hands and say, "I'll count whoever claims the term", but to the insider that's very silly. One of those guys really is a scientist, and one really is not. Organizations help, but are an imperfect standard. Being a professor of hard sciences at a university does not make you a scientist, and being in leadership of a large and well-recognized Christian organization does not make you a Christian, but, well -- these organizations are pretty good at policing themselves, so the folks within them, particularly the farther you go toward the top, are almost always legit. There are disagreements around the edges. Some will say those folks are doing soft science, and others will say it's not really science. Some will say some obscure denomination has gone too far by rejecting tradition too much, others will say it's fine. But substantially, substantially, the vast majority agree on who is in and out. You will not find a teaching or practice where 30% of Christians think it disqualifies you and 70% think it does not. It's 99% or 1%, almost without exception. (Infant baptism might be the exception that proves the rule here ;) ) If you were an outsider to science, I would say your best bet to determine whether someone was a scientist would be to ask someone from a known safe institution. Find a local geology grad student at a Real University, and ask him if this guy off the internet qualifies. The same test works for Christianity. Find a relatively educated Catholic, Orthodox, or mainline Protestant, and ask them if the person you're wondering about qualifies. That'll give you a pretty accurate answer. There's a quick and dirty test, too. For science, I would say it is this: does the person you're talking to embrace the doctrine of falsification? They're probably doing science. For Christianity, I would say -- does the person you're wondering about embrace the divinity of Christ? Probably Christian. Not a perfect test, and as an outsider it'll be hard to execute correctly, but it's not a bad place to start.

betenoire 10y ago
So in your objective reality, the mormon is a liar. But christianity is about your personal identity. You can't put rules on that for others. I used to be christian, and one that would fall under the "not a real christian" category. I proseltized. I knocked on doors for years and talked with thousands of people about their beliefs. Because of my personal experiences, I find your explanation lacking. There is not agreed-upon definition of a christian other than "says they are christian".
- lotharbot 10y ago
  Christianity is both personal and communal, and ultimately traces historically back to the nation of Israel, the person of Jesus, and the teachings of the Apostles. Someone claiming Christianity as a personal identity which does not correlate to the communal and historical understandings of Christianity is, at best, using a label in a misleading fashion. (They may be lying, they may be confused, they may genuinely disagree, but ultimately they're using the word in a confusing way -- claiming membership in a community and participation in a history which they reject.) The "big three" splits in Christianity can all be traced to genuine disagreements while retaining major agreement over key points. Orthodoxy and Catholicism split over the authority of the Roman leader (the Pope) as either equal to the leaders of the other main centers of Christianity or as supreme over them. Catholicism and Protestantism split over the authority of the Bible relative to the authority of tradition and contemporary church leaders. Various denominations within Protestantism split from each other over disagreements ranging from how baptism should be performed (dunking vs sprinkling) to whether women can be ordained as pastors. But through it all, there is a broad set of agreement -- that Jesus is God (connected to Trinitarian Monotheism), that the Bible is foundational for Christian belief, that fellowship with other believers helps refine and center Christians (consider phrases like "the body of Christ" and repeated references to "The Church" within the New Testament), and the centrality of grace/repentance/forgiveness to life as a Christian. While uneducated laymen from these groups might not recognize one another, among educated laymen, scholars, and theologians, there's like 99% agreement that they're all the same basic religion. There are fringe groups that don't follow this pattern. Mormonism is one of them -- at its founding, its "prophet", Joseph Smith, claimed that all of Christianity was an abomination, and that he alone held the keys to "Restored Christianity". He introduced three new foundational books which are treated with higher reverence than the Bible (the Book of Mormon, Doctrine & Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price). These books introduce "alternative history" -- the new people, events, cities, and technology found in the BoM have no historical or archaeological grounding. And these books (mostly D&C) introduce new beliefs and doctrines that are not found anywhere within Christian history, not in either mainstream or fringe groups. As such, Mormonism is rightly considered to be a new religion. (As an interesting aside, most Mormons did not consider themselves to be Christian up until the last few decades.) Likewise, Joel Osteen is broadly considered to not be teaching Christianity -- he might personally be a Christian, but he doesn't teach the stuff that every major branch of Christianity agrees is critical for being a Christian, like the need for repentance and forgiveness. The same can be said of various other fringe groups, televised preachers, etc. This matches up pretty well with the above comment about self-identifying as a scientist. The word actually has meaning beyond personal identity. It implies things about your community and about your beliefs/approach to knowledge meeting the standards of that community. And while there are always people on the fringes who claim the label, and always gray areas, you can get a pretty good read by going to a known-good source and then building a sort of network of trust from there.

by Dove 10y ago

betenoire 10y ago

So in your objective reality, the mormon is a liar. But christianity is about your personal identity. You can't put rules on that for others. I used to be christian, and one that would fall under the "not a real christian" category. I proseltized. I knocked on doors for years and talked with thousands of people about their beliefs. Because of my personal experiences, I find your explanation lacking. There is not agreed-upon definition of a christian other than "says they are christian".

lotharbot 10y ago
Christianity is both personal and communal, and ultimately traces historically back to the nation of Israel, the person of Jesus, and the teachings of the Apostles. Someone claiming Christianity as a personal identity which does not correlate to the communal and historical understandings of Christianity is, at best, using a label in a misleading fashion. (They may be lying, they may be confused, they may genuinely disagree, but ultimately they're using the word in a confusing way -- claiming membership in a community and participation in a history which they reject.) The "big three" splits in Christianity can all be traced to genuine disagreements while retaining major agreement over key points. Orthodoxy and Catholicism split over the authority of the Roman leader (the Pope) as either equal to the leaders of the other main centers of Christianity or as supreme over them. Catholicism and Protestantism split over the authority of the Bible relative to the authority of tradition and contemporary church leaders. Various denominations within Protestantism split from each other over disagreements ranging from how baptism should be performed (dunking vs sprinkling) to whether women can be ordained as pastors. But through it all, there is a broad set of agreement -- that Jesus is God (connected to Trinitarian Monotheism), that the Bible is foundational for Christian belief, that fellowship with other believers helps refine and center Christians (consider phrases like "the body of Christ" and repeated references to "The Church" within the New Testament), and the centrality of grace/repentance/forgiveness to life as a Christian. While uneducated laymen from these groups might not recognize one another, among educated laymen, scholars, and theologians, there's like 99% agreement that they're all the same basic religion. There are fringe groups that don't follow this pattern. Mormonism is one of them -- at its founding, its "prophet", Joseph Smith, claimed that all of Christianity was an abomination, and that he alone held the keys to "Restored Christianity". He introduced three new foundational books which are treated with higher reverence than the Bible (the Book of Mormon, Doctrine & Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price). These books introduce "alternative history" -- the new people, events, cities, and technology found in the BoM have no historical or archaeological grounding. And these books (mostly D&C) introduce new beliefs and doctrines that are not found anywhere within Christian history, not in either mainstream or fringe groups. As such, Mormonism is rightly considered to be a new religion. (As an interesting aside, most Mormons did not consider themselves to be Christian up until the last few decades.) Likewise, Joel Osteen is broadly considered to not be teaching Christianity -- he might personally be a Christian, but he doesn't teach the stuff that every major branch of Christianity agrees is critical for being a Christian, like the need for repentance and forgiveness. The same can be said of various other fringe groups, televised preachers, etc. This matches up pretty well with the above comment about self-identifying as a scientist. The word actually has meaning beyond personal identity. It implies things about your community and about your beliefs/approach to knowledge meeting the standards of that community. And while there are always people on the fringes who claim the label, and always gray areas, you can get a pretty good read by going to a known-good source and then building a sort of network of trust from there.