I think some people give up on Christianity not realising that they don't have to adhere to a harsh version of it with literal reading of certain parts of the bible leading to terrible views on 'dead horse ' issues and penal substitution etc. But I can't think of any other religion I would want for myself. I've read too much Richard Dawkins etc.
Any faith worth its salt should be relevant and appropriate for everyone. Christianity surely can, despite what some people seem to insist is the Only Right Way.
@KarlLB I guess it depends largely on how one sees oneself and sees the role or purpose of religion and its connection with one's faith or belief.
I am acquainted with a growing handful of Christians, who are about fed up with what they perceive christianity to have become (in the US) at least. They are looking for a Christian community that practices Christianity.
Just an idle thought I had this morning. I wondered what people thought.
I hope the title gives enough indication of the question I'm posing.
In terms of faith - what we believe - I think Christianity can work for everyone.
The aspect that might not work for everyone is church. Churches are essentially social institutions, but our individual sociability varies significantly - and the further our individual innate social "preferences" are from social norms, the harder it is likely to be to find a church we can live with, if at all.
And the two are linked - broadly speaking, churches help sustain faith (theological considerations aside). As an individual, maintaining a Christian faith is likely to be harder if you are unable to find a church that sustains you.
If Christianity (for some value of "Christianity") is true then it must work for everyone. That doesn't mean that one spiritual practice or service style must work for everyone.
The caveat about "some value of Christianity" is of course important. It's possible that reaching whatever the truth may require learning more from other religions than mainstream Christian theology has done in the last five hundred years or so. Or not. Nobody knows until it happens.
I think lease’s point is important. Churches fail when they do not offer a wide umbrella. They fail even more when they make a narrow umbrella compulsory for membership.
It’s a good idea to avoid churches whose appeal is polarising.
Define everyone. If you are from a different belief system and convert to Christianity you cannot be both. They are not the same.
If you believe Islam is correct you cannot believe Christianity is correct.
If Christianity (for some value of "Christianity") is true then it must work for everyone.
Could you flesh this out, please? I guess I would need to know what you mean by "true" and "work for" and maybe also "everyone." Well, ok. Even "Christianity".
My family were supremely indifferent to religion, so I guess a debate such as this would bounce off them. Have they suffered because of this? Dunno. I suppose not.
Aargh. Like many philosophical concepts it is easier to use those concepts than to explain them.
To be true is to say of reality what is real and the case. If something is true then it is the case independent of the believer (except in those cases where it is about the believer). I think it's fundamental to the concept of truth than it holds for everyone.
By everyone I mean all human beings, but presumably also any aliens, paranormal entities, artificial intelligences, and so on that may exist. If something is the case then it is the case. (Caveats about whether if lions could talk we could understand them apply: if a creature has a completely different form of life it might just not be able to grasp the concepts we apply to the world and vice versa.)
By work for, I take KarlL to mean aid in achieving the human good or human fulfilment. If Christianity is true and the end goal of human life is to know and love God, then that is the end goal of all created things in so far as they are able to do so.
As for what is Christianity, well, that's a whole thread in itself. I wouldn't want to endorse Christianity as white American nationalists understand it to be, for example.
If Christianity (for some value of "Christianity") is true then it must work for everyone. That doesn't mean that one spiritual practice or service style must work for everyone.
The caveat about "some value of Christianity" is of course important. It's possible that reaching whatever the truth may require learning more from other religions than mainstream Christian theology has done in the last five hundred years or so. Or not. Nobody knows until it happens.
Love the first proposition. I'd have thought that if it were true, or not, it has much more to learn from Rogerian psychology and returning to its social justice roots than other religions.
@KarlLB I guess it depends largely on how one sees oneself and sees the role or purpose of religion and its connection with one's faith or belief.
I am acquainted with a growing handful of Christians, who are about fed up with what they perceive christianity to have become (in the US) at least. They are looking for a Christian community that practices Christianity.
Let me know when they find 'a Christian community that practices Christianity.'
Then we can all join it.
More seriously, it's a great question that @KarlLB has raised and I'm not sure how to go about answering it. How do we know whether it 'works' or not? I heard a priest observe recently that the answer to anyone who suggests that we are hypocrites is to tell them that we'd be even worse if it wasn't for God's grace.
That may very well be the case, but we've got no way to objectively 'prove' that.
Yes, I'm convinced that Christ is the 'way the truth and the life' - but I'm no evangelist.
Nor do I believe that means that God isn't bothered about people who practice other faiths or none. Yes, I've 'signed up' for historic creedal Christianity and aim to 'work out (my) salvation with fear and trembling' in that context. I can't speak for anyone else. To their own master they stand or fall.
@KarlLB I guess it depends largely on how one sees oneself and sees the role or purpose of religion and its connection with one's faith or belief.
I am acquainted with a growing handful of Christians, who are about fed up with what they perceive christianity to have become (in the US) at least. They are looking for a Christian community that practices Christianity.
In one of his myriad talks, Christopher Hitchens shared: "I belong to what is a significant minority of human beings: Those who are—as Pascal puts it in his Pensées, his great apology for Christianity—“so made that they cannot believe.”
If religion is a construct, then the most reasonable answers to @KarlLB's questions are Yes & No, respectively.
This is such a complex and fascinating topic. As a theologian, I have so many thoughts but I'll try to not be a firehose on here.
While I have my own ideas about what constitutes "Christianity," my practice is that if someone calls themselves a Christian, then they're a Christian. It's not my place to police that, from a theological, spiritual, or institutional standpoint.
Christianity is grounded in history - specifically, in the historical revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. Where we go with that varies a lot.
The classic creeds, which so far I can generally still uphold, were fashioned in a particular place and time by particular people with their particular cultural lenses and philosophical presuppositions - that other people in other places and/or other times don't share. So I don't think Christianity has to be defined by "orthodoxy." Personally, I believe God is Trinity, and that Jesus is fully human and fully divine and truly present (in some way) in the Eucharist (I know, that bit's not in the creeds). But I'm less concerned with whether others believe those things than I am with whether or not they know God. Different kind of knowing. And I don't think God is petty.
Just as I know - and know about - my mom, say, differently than her sister does, doesn't mean we don't both know my mom. We also know things about her, even if they're different things; or if our knowledge about her varies a bit, it's a possibility one of us is wrong, but more likely that both of us have incomplete knowledge.
I'm a big fan of people working through their faith to find how it can be intellectually and spiritually honest for them, but more importantly, can be good news for them. Anyone who's really being honest about that, I think, will do some serious spiritual/theological work. Others - including some who check off all the credal boxes - may not experience that authenticity, and I do hope they seek it. I see the creeds as a decent starting place. I like how in my church (Episcopal, in the US) puts it in the first person plural: "We" believe - as a Church. YMMV as an individual, but the Church encourages trying out the beliefs, not just by saying them, but by experiencing them (or not) in the liturgy. Liturgy teaches us through our bodies/senses, but I hope not in any kind of manipulative way.
As a kind of aside, I do think Jesus is our only "way to the Father," but I don't think that necessarily means we have to know about him or know things about him. We might even know him in a sense without "correctly" identifying him. It's like breathing, I think: I don't have to understand anything about how lungs work; I just breathe, and oxygen gets to where it needs to be in my body, whether I even know that's the goal of breathing or not. I think we're saved through the Incarnation - God bridging the ontological gap between Creator and creation - and yes, I am a universalist, at least 99%. (I always leave some space for uncertainty and being ready to change my mind if confronted with compelling reasons to.)
If there's a specific doctrine anyone is struggling with, there's likely alternative ways of thinking about it and lots of literature to explore on the subject.
What's interesting about that is I'd say one of the things that absolutely doesn't work for me is the concept of knowing God. You need dialogue for that, dialogue where you don’t get to make up both sides in your head; dialogue where one side doesn't consist of Bible quotes dragged into play, but real dialogue.
That's the missing bit. And that's why I ask the question about whether it *really* works for everyone.
But not enough to not just want to believe, as do I, but to not believe. As do I.
What is it that you want to believe, if I may ask?
I don't imagine you as someone who would have a little chotsky on your table with "Believe" scrawled across it as one sees over here around Christmas time.
I don't get why it's all so elaborate and longwinded. It strikes me that God is here now. Do I need all the doctrines and saints and saviours, in short, the via, to get back to where I am?
Isn't that one aspect of the point, though? That for some, God just isn't obviously here now? And/or the other aspect being that for some, God struggles to arrive via some avenues?
Isn't that one aspect of the point, though? That for some, God just isn't obviously here now? And/or the other aspect being that for some, God struggles to arrive via some avenues?
Yes, I get the first bit. So the elaborateness and indirectness helps?
Well, this is the God of 613 mitzvot we're talking about. There are several minimalist options to choose from: "Be still & know that I am God," Micah 6:8, and the 'heart, soul, mind, strength, neighbor' bit, but in the end it's hard to assign simplicity to omnipotence & omniscience.
Most of us 'inherit' our religion and our personal religious beliefs from those around us,usually but not always,our immediate family. While we may tweak these beliefs somewhat they still remain for most of us the foundation of our religious beliefs.
It seems to me that most posters here,even although they may express serious reservations about traditional points of doctrine ,seem unable to envisage being part of some other religion.
For me personally all the Abrahamic Faiths are all one,even although as imperfect creatures we may understand ideas and express them in slightly different ways.
If I can accept them all as essentially one then I can also accept the similarities and differences with other religions.
And it does not stop me from accepting for myself the 'fullness of the Catholic Faith.'
It seems to me that most posters here,even although they may express serious reservations about traditional points of doctrine ,seem unable to envisage being part of some other religion. For me personally all the Abrahamic Faiths are all one,even although as imperfect creatures we may understand ideas and express them in slightly different ways.
It seems to me that making this assertion not only fails to take the distinctiveness of each of the 'Abrahamic Faiths' seriously but by doing so falls into the same problem of imagination you identify in your previous paragraph.
You may be making distinctions without differences, though, @chrisstiles. Ultimately you're talking about the same deity -- that's the oneness -- the rest is just constructs.
Yes,indeed each form is a distinct entity but they are linked together particularly in their seeing Abraham as their father in faith.
It is like French,Italian,Spanish and Portuguese which are separate languages with a number of individual words which perhaps only appear in one of them - e.g. the many words of Arabic origin which appear in Spanish. However they are essentially all forms of the same parent language.
It is also like the various forms of the Christian Faith.Our own experiences give us varying pictures of the 'Truth' some of which may diverge from what other Christians teach or believe but they are all attempts to 'love God and to love our neighbour as ourself.'
What's interesting about that is I'd say one of the things that absolutely doesn't work for me is the concept of knowing God.
Possibly outside people who regularly practice contemplative prayer, talk of knowing God is not the clearest piece of theological shorthand.
I do not regularly practice contemplative prayer.
I think this is where negative theology comes in.
It's been suggested that one says someone is praying or talking to God when they are apparently talking to nobody, one says someone trusts in God to the extent that they act as if they trust, but don't trust in anything in particular, and that one says someone loves God to the extent that they love everybody.
So similarly "Knowing God" in this life for most of us I suppose means trying to be clear sighted about the needs and existence of our neighbours (and the created world around us) without our self-serving fantasies getting in the way.
But not enough to not just want to believe, as do I, but to not believe. As do I.
What is it that you want to believe, if I may ask?
I don't imagine you as someone who would have a little chotsky on your table with "Believe" scrawled across it as one sees over here around Christmas time.
I want, desire, to be believe that all is well for all, for everything that's ever suffered, forever. Silly isn't it? Pathetic. I want what I've lost, till I die. Well, we all buy in to stories don't we. When I know it isn't. Well. Suffering ends, that's it. I envy you all : ) But at least I believe that I must make the best of things now, as no else can in oblivion.
Except for the ones that burn people of other paths at the stake, or preach to this day that the other is not a true faith, and that they're going to Hell for eternity, etc., etc., etc. But I digress.
I think that if someone wants a religious aspect to their life, or wants to cultivate something spiritual, it's not so much a matter of a religion being right or wrong as much as it is a matter of facility and feedback. The Truth of it may eventually become an issue, but it doesn't always, especially if the practice of the religion has intrinsic meaning(s).
Well, this is the God of 613 mitzvot we're talking about. There are several minimalist options to choose from: "Be still & know that I am God," . . . .
FWIW, while that verse is almost always quoted in the context of meditative quiet, I don’t think that’s what the psalmist intended at all. In the context of the preceding and following lines,
9 [The Lord] makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the shields with fire.
“Be still, and know that I am God!
I am exalted among the nations;
I am exalted in the earth.”
I think the meaning is more “all you people who think you’re something, get over yourselves, stop making war and shut up!”
What's interesting about that is I'd say one of the things that absolutely doesn't work for me is the concept of knowing God. You need dialogue for that, dialogue where you don’t get to make up both sides in your head; dialogue where one side doesn't consist of Bible quotes dragged into play, but real dialogue.
Does it require dialogue? I guess it depends on what is meant by know. I realize I’m dragging Bible quotes in, but I have it mind 1 John 4:
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. . . . Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us, and his love is perfected in us.
(Emphasis added.)
Personally, I’ve got little problem leaving it at “everyone who loves knows God.”
One of my favorite Biblical passages is the great judgement scene in Matthew 25, which more or less defines what it means to be a good human being. It defines this in terms of behavior, not in terms of belief or ethnicity or wealth or gender or gender preference or anything of the sort. It does mention the Son of man and the King, but other than that, I think it would be highly portable to non-Christians.
The 'knowing God' and dialogue thing is an interesting one ... if that doesn't sound too trite.
What form would or should such dialogue take? Writing on the wall? Thoughts? Impressions? Warm fuzzy feelings?
I do believe God is 'relational' and personal - God in three persons, blessed Trinity. How we apprehend this is a moot point. It can sound like imaginary friend territory. Or 'My mate Jesus ...'
I can understand the contemplative prayer thing and the 'via negativa' and apophatic approach - at least intellectually speaking. I've been thinking about this sort of thing a lot more recently as my younger daughter no longer lives here and my elder daughter isn't speaking to me 😞 and I'm now living alone. Sure, I see people and am involved with things but much of the time am on my own and try to pray.
I s'pose I find it something of a 'dialogue' insofar as I try to 'interrogate' biblical or liturgical texts and engage/interact with them - which I'd see as something of a 'pneumatic' activity but without the rather 'out-there' charismatic dimension that implies. By which I mean I don't expect God to tell me what to eat for breakfast.
I've known times on retreat and so on where it's all felt very immediate. At other times I wonder whether it's all just wishful thinking.
But I can't really imagine being anything other than a Christian believer of some kind. It feels as if I've come too far to stop now.
I'm trying to do the Lent stuff as assiduously as I can this year, without being too hair-shirt about it. I feel my house is turning into a hermitage at times. I observe a daily 'office', have little set rituals. There are no flashing lights or the old Bishop Butler thing - 'Sir, the pretending to special revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is an horrid thing. A very horrid thing.'
😉
But there are times when 'my heart is strangely warmed.'
You may be making distinctions without differences, though, @chrisstiles. Ultimately you're talking about the same deity -- that's the oneness -- the rest is just constructs.
In your opinion, others are available, and yours is hardly representative of the mass of adherents of each religion (many of whom find a lot of that inclusive language highly problematic given the history of very real strife between those religions), and again it seems to be prey to the same failure of imagination that the post I replied to described.
But not enough to not just want to believe, as do I, but to not believe. As do I.
What is it that you want to believe, if I may ask?
I don't imagine you as someone who would have a little chotsky on your table with "Believe" scrawled across it as one sees over here around Christmas time.
I want, desire, to be believe that all is well for all, for everything that's ever suffered, forever. Silly isn't it? Pathetic. I want what I've lost, till I die. Well, we all buy in to stories don't we. When I know it isn't. Well. Suffering ends, that's it. I envy you all : ) But at least I believe that I must make the best of things now, as no [one] else can in oblivion.
Happy days!
Not senility... just catching up with Silent Witness and posting on me phone. Up to 2008! I used to eschew it as Amanda Burton annoyed the hell out of me, and then I realised after 25 years that's part of it.
Ultimately you're talking about the same deity -- that's the oneness -- the rest is just constructs.
In your opinion, others are available, and yours is hardly representative of the mass of adherents of each religion (many of whom find a lot of that inclusive language highly problematic given the history of very real strife between those religions), and again it seems to be prey to the same failure of imagination that the post I replied to described.
I don't follow what you're getting at.
That there is one God, creator of everything, is a shared belief among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. That the word "God" used within any monotheistic tradition refers to that creator is I think linguistic common sense and recognised by Christian tradition. (I believe Jewish and Muslim tradition likewise, although of course they have problems with the Trinity.)
If what you're saying is that there are significant differences in what the different faiths believe about the same God, that's true.
When it comes to spirituality, as I understand it there's a distinction in emphasis between Christian spirituality and Hindu/ Buddhist spirituality in that Christianity aims to retrain desire and Hindu/Buddhist spirituality tries to lay desire to rest. Islam I think belongs with Christianity, though it has less of a contemplative tradition outside Sufism.
I think Jesus is non-negotiable. To what extent that applies to Christianity, whatever you want to call by that name, is another matter.
And from what I know of him, he deals with different people in different ways. I really don't dare to say that the way he deals with me is the way he must deal with somebody else, because we are all quite different and what "works" for me may be really unhelpful for someone else.
For the past couple of weeks the thing that's been sticking in my mind is this bit out of John 14:
18 “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. 19 Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. 20 In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. 21 Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.” 22 Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?” 23 Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. 24 Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father's who sent me."
What it means for Jesus to manifest himself to someone is left unexplained. I know what it means for me. I can imagine it might be very different for someone else. But that close connection between love and obedience and manifestation is catching my eye.
You may be making distinctions without differences, though, @chrisstiles. Ultimately you're talking about the same deity -- that's the oneness -- the rest is just constructs.
In your opinion, others are available, and yours is hardly representative of the mass of adherents of each religion (many of whom find a lot of that inclusive language highly problematic given the history of very real strife between those religions), and again it seems to be prey to the same failure of imagination that the post I replied to described.
Sure it's my opinion. That hardly matters. The fact that the three monotheisms take issue with each other over traded abuses doesn't really have anything to do with the fact that they're still all praying to the same deity. If there are stark differences among the respective components and characteristics of the three monotheism's "God," I'm unfamiliar with them. As far as I can surmise, Christianity has evolved to a position from which it views Judaism as more or less moot, since Christians believe that as Messiah, Jesus fulfilled the Law. Islam has evolved to a position from which it views both Judaism and Christianity as more or less moot, because Islam is the Last and Complete Revelation, revealed perfectly via Muhammad (peace be upon him), unalterable and unchallengeable. As the original monotheism, Jews believe that both Christianity and Islam have jumped the shark. Those are the constructs, around which all kinds of opinions are formed, mine included, which happens to be that at this point (the 21st century) all three of them equally more or less moot. Still, YHWH <-> God <-> Allah.
To your second point, I'd once again say that you're asking for distinctions w/out differences (among the monotheisms), since what you're referencing IMO are secondary constructs and not primary understandings about the persons of the monotheistic God. Maybe my perspective is too detached. Maybe I'm just talking myself in circles. I may be wrong, but a lot of what you're pointing to may more closely concern religious practices, and not core theology. Of course the practices are going to denote the monotheisms as quite different from one another -- even opposing at times, as you've pointed out. But primarily, I don't think that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim prayers all reach distinct spiritual destinations.
And I'm all for imagination. The religions created by humans certainly represent and animate our imagination more than anything else ever has, does, or will. The real trick of imagination for me now, is to "envisage being part of some other" kind of existence completely: one without religion at its core.
Sorry to double post, but I just missed the edit window.
ETA: I'm a casual West Ham United fan. If I were to switch my support to say, Bournemouth, I haven't changed sports, merely allegiances. However, if I were to disavow WHU football for cycling's Groupama-FDJ, well then... I've changed religions.
24.15 "But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
That's an intriguing thing about the OT: it readily and regularly acknowledges other gods. Not as empty idolatry, but in a straight-up admission that there are in fact other gods out there to be worshipped. YHWH made it clear that the Israelites were his people, and that he was their god, and that there were other gods they should not engage.
I want, desire, to believe that all is well for all, for everything that's ever suffered, forever. Silly isn't it? Pathetic. I want what I've lost, till I die. Well, we all buy in to stories don't we. When I know it isn't. Well. Suffering ends, that's it. I envy you all : ) But at least I believe that I must make the best of things now, as no else can in oblivion.
Happy days!
That a humanist would desire for humanity to be humane? Would strive to develop and exert his own humanness for the benefit of others?
I want, desire, to believe that all is well for all, for everything that's ever suffered, forever. Silly isn't it? Pathetic. I want what I've lost, till I die. Well, we all buy in to stories don't we. When I know it isn't. Well. Suffering ends, that's it. I envy you all : ) But at least I believe that I must make the best of things now, as no else can in oblivion.
Happy days!
That a humanist would desire for humanity to be humane? Would strive to develop and exert his own humanness for the benefit of others?
This is hardly silly or pathetic.
My strivings are a pursing of the lips, a twitching of the little finger, as they were when I believed more. But I had a nice interaction with a guy from a hostel yesterday, embracing him in his helpless fascism.
Ultimately you're talking about the same deity -- that's the oneness -- the rest is just constructs.
In your opinion, others are available, and yours is hardly representative of the mass of adherents of each religion (many of whom find a lot of that inclusive language highly problematic given the history of very real strife between those religions), and again it seems to be prey to the same failure of imagination that the post I replied to described.
I don't follow what you're getting at.
That there is one God, creator of everything, is a shared belief among Christians, Jews, and Muslims.
Just because all these groups believe in a single God, doesn't necessarily mean they grant any level of legitimacy to the fact that any of the other groups believe in a single God. This can run the gamut of a kind of agnostic ambiguity, through believing that some other group gets the attributes of God wrong enough to render any kind of belief invalid, through to the conviction that another group actually believes in a false God.
As such the being unable to "envisage being part of some other religion" (because of what all right thinking people think etc.) seems as much of a failure of imagination as the belief that "all the Abrahamic Faiths are all one" (because which right thinking person doesn't etc).
Comments
Anyone who believes there is a God can make that their aim; even someone who doesn't can aim at the second half. It's not uniquely Christian.
Christianity adds a load of other stuff. Prayer. Liturgy. Reading or hearing Scripture. A particular window of possibilities about the nature of God.
What if those elements don't work for everyone?
I am acquainted with a growing handful of Christians, who are about fed up with what they perceive christianity to have become (in the US) at least. They are looking for a Christian community that practices Christianity.
Something like what @Merry Vole said.
The aspect that might not work for everyone is church. Churches are essentially social institutions, but our individual sociability varies significantly - and the further our individual innate social "preferences" are from social norms, the harder it is likely to be to find a church we can live with, if at all.
And the two are linked - broadly speaking, churches help sustain faith (theological considerations aside). As an individual, maintaining a Christian faith is likely to be harder if you are unable to find a church that sustains you.
The caveat about "some value of Christianity" is of course important. It's possible that reaching whatever the truth may require learning more from other religions than mainstream Christian theology has done in the last five hundred years or so. Or not. Nobody knows until it happens.
It’s a good idea to avoid churches whose appeal is polarising.
If you believe Islam is correct you cannot believe Christianity is correct.
Could you flesh this out, please? I guess I would need to know what you mean by "true" and "work for" and maybe also "everyone." Well, ok. Even "Christianity".
To be true is to say of reality what is real and the case. If something is true then it is the case independent of the believer (except in those cases where it is about the believer). I think it's fundamental to the concept of truth than it holds for everyone.
By everyone I mean all human beings, but presumably also any aliens, paranormal entities, artificial intelligences, and so on that may exist. If something is the case then it is the case. (Caveats about whether if lions could talk we could understand them apply: if a creature has a completely different form of life it might just not be able to grasp the concepts we apply to the world and vice versa.)
By work for, I take KarlL to mean aid in achieving the human good or human fulfilment. If Christianity is true and the end goal of human life is to know and love God, then that is the end goal of all created things in so far as they are able to do so.
As for what is Christianity, well, that's a whole thread in itself. I wouldn't want to endorse Christianity as white American nationalists understand it to be, for example.
Love the first proposition. I'd have thought that if it were true, or not, it has much more to learn from Rogerian psychology and returning to its social justice roots than other religions.
Let me know when they find 'a Christian community that practices Christianity.'
Then we can all join it.
More seriously, it's a great question that @KarlLB has raised and I'm not sure how to go about answering it. How do we know whether it 'works' or not? I heard a priest observe recently that the answer to anyone who suggests that we are hypocrites is to tell them that we'd be even worse if it wasn't for God's grace.
That may very well be the case, but we've got no way to objectively 'prove' that.
Yes, I'm convinced that Christ is the 'way the truth and the life' - but I'm no evangelist.
Nor do I believe that means that God isn't bothered about people who practice other faiths or none. Yes, I've 'signed up' for historic creedal Christianity and aim to 'work out (my) salvation with fear and trembling' in that context. I can't speak for anyone else. To their own master they stand or fall.
No! We'd wreck it.
If religion is a construct, then the most reasonable answers to @KarlLB's questions are Yes & No, respectively.
While I have my own ideas about what constitutes "Christianity," my practice is that if someone calls themselves a Christian, then they're a Christian. It's not my place to police that, from a theological, spiritual, or institutional standpoint.
Christianity is grounded in history - specifically, in the historical revelation of God in the person of Jesus Christ. Where we go with that varies a lot.
The classic creeds, which so far I can generally still uphold, were fashioned in a particular place and time by particular people with their particular cultural lenses and philosophical presuppositions - that other people in other places and/or other times don't share. So I don't think Christianity has to be defined by "orthodoxy." Personally, I believe God is Trinity, and that Jesus is fully human and fully divine and truly present (in some way) in the Eucharist (I know, that bit's not in the creeds). But I'm less concerned with whether others believe those things than I am with whether or not they know God. Different kind of knowing. And I don't think God is petty.
Just as I know - and know about - my mom, say, differently than her sister does, doesn't mean we don't both know my mom. We also know things about her, even if they're different things; or if our knowledge about her varies a bit, it's a possibility one of us is wrong, but more likely that both of us have incomplete knowledge.
I'm a big fan of people working through their faith to find how it can be intellectually and spiritually honest for them, but more importantly, can be good news for them. Anyone who's really being honest about that, I think, will do some serious spiritual/theological work. Others - including some who check off all the credal boxes - may not experience that authenticity, and I do hope they seek it. I see the creeds as a decent starting place. I like how in my church (Episcopal, in the US) puts it in the first person plural: "We" believe - as a Church. YMMV as an individual, but the Church encourages trying out the beliefs, not just by saying them, but by experiencing them (or not) in the liturgy. Liturgy teaches us through our bodies/senses, but I hope not in any kind of manipulative way.
As a kind of aside, I do think Jesus is our only "way to the Father," but I don't think that necessarily means we have to know about him or know things about him. We might even know him in a sense without "correctly" identifying him. It's like breathing, I think: I don't have to understand anything about how lungs work; I just breathe, and oxygen gets to where it needs to be in my body, whether I even know that's the goal of breathing or not. I think we're saved through the Incarnation - God bridging the ontological gap between Creator and creation - and yes, I am a universalist, at least 99%. (I always leave some space for uncertainty and being ready to change my mind if confronted with compelling reasons to.)
If there's a specific doctrine anyone is struggling with, there's likely alternative ways of thinking about it and lots of literature to explore on the subject.
That's the missing bit. And that's why I ask the question about whether it *really* works for everyone.
What is it that you want to believe, if I may ask?
I don't imagine you as someone who would have a little chotsky on your table with "Believe" scrawled across it as one sees over here around Christmas time.
Yes, I get the first bit. So the elaborateness and indirectness helps?
It seems to me that most posters here,even although they may express serious reservations about traditional points of doctrine ,seem unable to envisage being part of some other religion.
For me personally all the Abrahamic Faiths are all one,even although as imperfect creatures we may understand ideas and express them in slightly different ways.
If I can accept them all as essentially one then I can also accept the similarities and differences with other religions.
And it does not stop me from accepting for myself the 'fullness of the Catholic Faith.'
It seems to me that making this assertion not only fails to take the distinctiveness of each of the 'Abrahamic Faiths' seriously but by doing so falls into the same problem of imagination you identify in your previous paragraph.
It is like French,Italian,Spanish and Portuguese which are separate languages with a number of individual words which perhaps only appear in one of them - e.g. the many words of Arabic origin which appear in Spanish. However they are essentially all forms of the same parent language.
I do not regularly practice contemplative prayer.
I think this is where negative theology comes in.
It's been suggested that one says someone is praying or talking to God when they are apparently talking to nobody, one says someone trusts in God to the extent that they act as if they trust, but don't trust in anything in particular, and that one says someone loves God to the extent that they love everybody.
So similarly "Knowing God" in this life for most of us I suppose means trying to be clear sighted about the needs and existence of our neighbours (and the created world around us) without our self-serving fantasies getting in the way.
I want, desire, to be believe that all is well for all, for everything that's ever suffered, forever. Silly isn't it? Pathetic. I want what I've lost, till I die. Well, we all buy in to stories don't we. When I know it isn't. Well. Suffering ends, that's it. I envy you all : ) But at least I believe that I must make the best of things now, as no else can in oblivion.
Happy days!
But 'seeing Abraham as my father in faith ' I'm not sure. Do Moslems say that?
I think that if someone wants a religious aspect to their life, or wants to cultivate something spiritual, it's not so much a matter of a religion being right or wrong as much as it is a matter of facility and feedback. The Truth of it may eventually become an issue, but it doesn't always, especially if the practice of the religion has intrinsic meaning(s).
Does it require dialogue? I guess it depends on what is meant by know. I realize I’m dragging Bible quotes in, but I have it mind 1 John 4: (Emphasis added.)
Personally, I’ve got little problem leaving it at “everyone who loves knows God.”
I agree 100% with what HarryCH has just said.
What form would or should such dialogue take? Writing on the wall? Thoughts? Impressions? Warm fuzzy feelings?
I do believe God is 'relational' and personal - God in three persons, blessed Trinity. How we apprehend this is a moot point. It can sound like imaginary friend territory. Or 'My mate Jesus ...'
I can understand the contemplative prayer thing and the 'via negativa' and apophatic approach - at least intellectually speaking. I've been thinking about this sort of thing a lot more recently as my younger daughter no longer lives here and my elder daughter isn't speaking to me 😞 and I'm now living alone. Sure, I see people and am involved with things but much of the time am on my own and try to pray.
I s'pose I find it something of a 'dialogue' insofar as I try to 'interrogate' biblical or liturgical texts and engage/interact with them - which I'd see as something of a 'pneumatic' activity but without the rather 'out-there' charismatic dimension that implies. By which I mean I don't expect God to tell me what to eat for breakfast.
I've known times on retreat and so on where it's all felt very immediate. At other times I wonder whether it's all just wishful thinking.
But I can't really imagine being anything other than a Christian believer of some kind. It feels as if I've come too far to stop now.
I'm trying to do the Lent stuff as assiduously as I can this year, without being too hair-shirt about it. I feel my house is turning into a hermitage at times. I observe a daily 'office', have little set rituals. There are no flashing lights or the old Bishop Butler thing - 'Sir, the pretending to special revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost is an horrid thing. A very horrid thing.'
😉
But there are times when 'my heart is strangely warmed.'
There are ways to keep warm.
In your opinion, others are available, and yours is hardly representative of the mass of adherents of each religion (many of whom find a lot of that inclusive language highly problematic given the history of very real strife between those religions), and again it seems to be prey to the same failure of imagination that the post I replied to described.
Not senility... just catching up with Silent Witness and posting on me phone. Up to 2008! I used to eschew it as Amanda Burton annoyed the hell out of me, and then I realised after 25 years that's part of it.
And yes, perfect @Dafyd.
That there is one God, creator of everything, is a shared belief among Christians, Jews, and Muslims. That the word "God" used within any monotheistic tradition refers to that creator is I think linguistic common sense and recognised by Christian tradition. (I believe Jewish and Muslim tradition likewise, although of course they have problems with the Trinity.)
If what you're saying is that there are significant differences in what the different faiths believe about the same God, that's true.
When it comes to spirituality, as I understand it there's a distinction in emphasis between Christian spirituality and Hindu/ Buddhist spirituality in that Christianity aims to retrain desire and Hindu/Buddhist spirituality tries to lay desire to rest. Islam I think belongs with Christianity, though it has less of a contemplative tradition outside Sufism.
And from what I know of him, he deals with different people in different ways. I really don't dare to say that the way he deals with me is the way he must deal with somebody else, because we are all quite different and what "works" for me may be really unhelpful for someone else.
For the past couple of weeks the thing that's been sticking in my mind is this bit out of John 14:
What it means for Jesus to manifest himself to someone is left unexplained. I know what it means for me. I can imagine it might be very different for someone else. But that close connection between love and obedience and manifestation is catching my eye.
Sure it's my opinion. That hardly matters. The fact that the three monotheisms take issue with each other over traded abuses doesn't really have anything to do with the fact that they're still all praying to the same deity. If there are stark differences among the respective components and characteristics of the three monotheism's "God," I'm unfamiliar with them. As far as I can surmise, Christianity has evolved to a position from which it views Judaism as more or less moot, since Christians believe that as Messiah, Jesus fulfilled the Law. Islam has evolved to a position from which it views both Judaism and Christianity as more or less moot, because Islam is the Last and Complete Revelation, revealed perfectly via Muhammad (peace be upon him), unalterable and unchallengeable. As the original monotheism, Jews believe that both Christianity and Islam have jumped the shark. Those are the constructs, around which all kinds of opinions are formed, mine included, which happens to be that at this point (the 21st century) all three of them equally more or less moot. Still, YHWH <-> God <-> Allah.
To your second point, I'd once again say that you're asking for distinctions w/out differences (among the monotheisms), since what you're referencing IMO are secondary constructs and not primary understandings about the persons of the monotheistic God. Maybe my perspective is too detached. Maybe I'm just talking myself in circles. I may be wrong, but a lot of what you're pointing to may more closely concern religious practices, and not core theology. Of course the practices are going to denote the monotheisms as quite different from one another -- even opposing at times, as you've pointed out. But primarily, I don't think that Jewish, Christian, and Muslim prayers all reach distinct spiritual destinations.
And I'm all for imagination. The religions created by humans certainly represent and animate our imagination more than anything else ever has, does, or will. The real trick of imagination for me now, is to "envisage being part of some other" kind of existence completely: one without religion at its core.
ETA: I'm a casual West Ham United fan. If I were to switch my support to say, Bournemouth, I haven't changed sports, merely allegiances. However, if I were to disavow WHU football for cycling's Groupama-FDJ, well then... I've changed religions.
24.15 "But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
That a humanist would desire for humanity to be humane? Would strive to develop and exert his own humanness for the benefit of others?
This is hardly silly or pathetic.
My strivings are a pursing of the lips, a twitching of the little finger, as they were when I believed more. But I had a nice interaction with a guy from a hostel yesterday, embracing him in his helpless fascism.
Just because all these groups believe in a single God, doesn't necessarily mean they grant any level of legitimacy to the fact that any of the other groups believe in a single God. This can run the gamut of a kind of agnostic ambiguity, through believing that some other group gets the attributes of God wrong enough to render any kind of belief invalid, through to the conviction that another group actually believes in a false God.
As such the being unable to "envisage being part of some other religion" (because of what all right thinking people think etc.) seems as much of a failure of imagination as the belief that "all the Abrahamic Faiths are all one" (because which right thinking person doesn't etc).