Bad News About Christianity
Christianity is the world's biggest religion, with about 2.1 billion followers worldwide. JEMC also incorporates topics concerning the relationship between Christianity and other religions in the early modern period (Judaism, Islam, etc.). The journal's comparative approach gives expression to a broader intellectual ambition of stimulating research that is not restricted to a local or national scope, but takes advantage of the rich theoretical possibilities of comparing and synthesizing at a European, international, and even global level.
Thus, many Christians who are ready to enter into a "dialogue" with Judaism as a religious (by which they mean denominational, theological, or semi-ecclesiastical) entity are at a loss how to face what is to them the "secular" phenomenon of Zionism and the modern State of Israel.
Christianity further teaches that once a person is "born again" (becomes saved) that the Holy Spirit lives in that person and the person is changed: "Therefore if any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come," (2 Cor.
Despite the efforts of the First Council of Nicaea , convened by order of the Roman emperor Constantine I in 325 CE (which tried to crush all divergent philosophies, theologies, sketch comedy and texts out of existence, and create the first "official" orthodoxy) Christianity would continue to fracture and schism.
But whilst recognizing this providential dispensation in the election of St. Paul , we cannot, in face of his own express and emphatic testimony, go on to assert that he universalized Christianity, as Philo attempted to universalize Judaism , by adding to its ethical content the merely natural religion of the Greek thinkers of his own more sublime and pure conceptions.
In order to better understand long term processes of development, the analysis includes forms of early Christianity and investigates persistence and transformation of other religious practices in Antiquity. The great diversity of Christianity is one of its most striking characteristics.
This contention can best be refuted by showing that the essential doctrines of Christianity are contained already in the New Testament Scriptures , while giving, at the same time, their due force to the traditions of corporate Christianity If the Nicene Creed cannot be proved article by article from the sacred records , interpreted by the tradition that preceded them and determined their canon, then the rationalist assertion will have some support.