Dispelling the Myth that Christians Are Hopelessly Divided on Core Beliefs
Posted by Anthony on January 12, 2008
One of the main lines of attacks that skeptics have employed is along the lines of language. For example, ‘Intelligent Design’ should be a redundancy, but today evolutionists talk all the time about organisms being ‘designed’ but insist that design was done by natural processes. This gives them the advantage of being able to admit that the evidence of design is undeniable while simultaneously denying the obvious implication. They call this Science. This is but one example of how atheists equivocate on the meanings of words. Few words have been bastardized like the term ‘Christian.’
Cults like the Mormons and the Jehovah Witnesses desperately try to appropriate the term and this despite the fact that in both cases their teachings are dramatically contradictory to the historic understanding of the term. Atheists let them get away with it: if someone self-identifies as a ‘Christian’ who is anyone else to stop them. For this reason I have often called myself a Christian atheist in order to lampoon such silly reasoning, often receiving the rebuke that that is a contradiction in terms. Oh, now they care about contradictions of terms!
Ironically, atheists will bend over backwards in their dogmatic assertions of just what an atheist is while they themselves dismiss any attempt to clarify just what is meant by the term ‘Christian.’ You can make the Scriptures say anything, they say. Well, at least with Christianity there is some sort of standard at all that could be treated as objective. There is no such transcending standard by which authoritative assertions of what constitutes an ‘atheist’ could be measured against. An ‘atheist’ is whatever the individual atheist asserts it to be and no other atheist can say otherwise.
Such conversations have driven me to defend the proposition that there is a historic understanding of the term. I think it would be helpful to post material from such a defense on my blog. The truth is that as atheist Bertrand Russell acknowledged there really was a time when saying one was a ‘Christian’ meant something and one knew what it meant. But it is also true that despite the constant perversions of the term, there are literally hundreds of millions of people who abide by the very same doctrines that Russell and most modern atheists believe are largely ancient history asserting basically that today there is a free-for-all, prompting smug atheists to say: “You want me to believe in God? Which one?” As though the variations were limitless.
While it is true that it took some time for the Christian community to clarify itself against a series of opponents, they did succeed in doing so. The creeds are the result of that process, and were completed no later than about 400 AD. After that, there was very little change in the meaning of the term until the Protestant reformation- more than a thousand years later- and even then the core teachings enshrined in the creeds are still upheld… to this very day.
That’s right. More than a billion Christians today uphold the same doctrines upheld in explicit terms since 400 AD and less codified terms since 50 AD. More than a billion. I don’t mean to minimize the fact that there are often wide and important divergences, but those who wish to escape the claims of Christianity by disputing that there are any have no legs to stand on. Below I have gone through and cataloged where and referenced where numerous groups who ‘self-identify’ as Christian stand in relation to the core orthodox doctrines. There is much more commonality than skeptics would have us believe. It is culled from the thread already linked to above. Read the rest of the entry… »
