Posted on 09/27/2022 10:53:30 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Indeed
The survey itself says this:
Evangelicals were defined by LifeWay Research as people who strongly agreed with the following four statements:
The Bible is the highest authority for what I believe.
It is very important for me personally to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus Christ as their Savior.
Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacrifice that could remove the penalty of my sin.
Only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior receive God’s free gift of eternal salvation.
To my mind, someone who affirms strongly the above propositions but who then does not accept the divinity of Jesus is, to say the least, one very confused "Christian."
There are mysteries surrounding the exact relationship of God and Christ, the exact architecture of heaven, the nature of the miracles in Christ’s birth, life, and resurrection. I don’t expect to completely understand this side of heaven. We’ll all find out when we get there. In the meantime I take the text as it’s written. There may be some deeper meaning I’m not privy to, so I’ll just take scripture at it’s word.
God shows us some things as we walk it out and the rest will wait.
Our church leaders are failing us. Time to go back to teaching basics instead of trying to make everyone feel good.
Sobering statistics. As a pastor I assume everyone in the congregation is on the same page when it comes to basics like Jesus is God. I may need to not make that assumption.
See Jane run, run Jane run.
Spot gets the ball.
We are sinners who need a savior
Jesus is our savior
Jesus (and the Holy Spirit) is one with the Father
This is a damning indictment against the American Church
The Law is based on love. We have duties to God (the first four) and duties to our fellow man. We should strive to keep the commandments in their entirety but , being as we are weak, will fall short unless the Holy Spirit supplants our efforts. But the Law is eternal. It doesn’t save because that is not its purpose. It’s a yardstick to see where we measure up and see why we need a Savior.
The commies are doing a great job in the churches. Just as they planned.
This may seem odd but although the church I was raised in certainly fits within the usual understanding of “evangelical” I never heard the word used to describe us and never thought about it one way or the other.
Only after living in Latin America did I adopt the word, because there the assumption is that you are Catholic or “evangelico”.
I suppose it’s because the church of my youth did not see themselves as “part” of some broader body of Christ. Whereas in my adulthood I did come to see myself as exactly that, part of a broader body of Christ. Christians aren’t limited to any particular denomination, they are where you find them. You can’t go by the sign above the door.
“This is nothing. The deity of Christ was the issue the Nicene counsel assembled to address.”
The rise of the interdenominational megachurch is doing much to erode American religion.
By saying you are interdenominational it means you don’t care about issues of theology. The the trinity, predestination, the nature of sin. These are all core questions that should affect your life entire.
Churches that ignore them are feeding their congregants pablum.
So what exactly are these people evangelizing? It sure isn’t Jesus of Nazareth who was executed and died, but stopped being dead three days later. It’s not the One who created the universe and who sits at the right hand of The Father. It’s not the one who holds the keys to death and hell and who is coming back for His spotless bride. It’s not the One who gave Himself as the one and only sacrifice for our sins.
Lots of fools will be in Hell because they don’t read or believe The Bible.
The word “Christian” is loosely defined these days.
Seems like an awful lot of “professing Christians” these days - might as well be looking to Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny for their eternity..
I mean.. why even bother?
I prefer to just refer to myself as “Christian”. That seems sufficient.
Exactly right. The common conception of “original sin” is wrong. I stand condemned not because of Adam’s sin, or my father’s sin, but by my own sin. Even in the OT, God said at least twice: “the soul that sins, it shall die,” e.g., Ezek. 18:20, Jer. 31:30. The idea that each newborn baby is born with sins already “charged to its account” is unscriptural nonsense that arose, I suspect, after the post-Constantinian church started to agitate for universal infant baptism.
I suppose it’s because the church of my youth did not see themselves as “part” of some broader body of Christ. Whereas in my adulthood I did come to see myself as exactly that, part of a broader body of Christ. Christians aren’t limited to any particular denomination, they are where you find them. You can’t go by the sign above the door.
I prefer to just refer to myself as “Christian”. That seems sufficient.
In a perfect world where there were no distinctions or divisions among Christians, that would be the ideal, but as your experience in Latin America shows, sometimes one needs to make the distinction to avoid confusion or misunderstanding. In discussing matters of the Faith I would speak differently to a Catholic than I would to a Methodist, than I would to a Baptist, etc., because even though we're all Christians, within our different faith traditions we sometimes have different understandings of things, ways of speaking about them, and even different definitions of words like grace, justification, sanctification, predestination, etc.
So many people who claim to be Christian are forgetting to read the Bible!
He wasn’t God. He said he wasn’t. He was the “son of God”.
This is what you get with the buffet style christianity of paulinism:
a millennia of knot-twisting to the point of incoherency.
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