What is "True Christianity"?
How does one go about arguing that their version of Christianity is the "True Christianity"™? This is an epistemological and exegetical problem. I have discussed this previously with regard to Islam and its differences to Christianity in '“True Islam” and violent extremism – redux' and "Islam vs Christianity: the core differences", the latter which I will now quote:
Comparing the Provenance of Islam and Christianity
It starts with the holy books, the codification and revelation of said religions. With Christianity, we have the Bible, which is the ‘inspired word of God’. This can mean several things to different people. But, by and large, most Christians believe this to mean that the books, many and varied, were written by humans, though with some kind of divine inspiration. Perhaps not, though. The key is that it was mere humans that wrote things down, itself an interpretative process. This means that the reading of the holy book is itself a further interpretative process over and above the interpretative process of writing.
The Qu’ran, on the other hand, is THE word of God, dictated to Muhammad, and written down as is. You can’t argue with it, because you would be arguing directly with God. In fact, you really need to read it in Arabic, the original language of the book. Although there is some interpretative process going on in reading it, the scope is far less. We know who took down the dictation, and supposedly lots about him. With the Bible, we can merely guess at many of the writers, and critical scholarship allows us to be thoroughly skeptical about the received traditions of who supposedly wrote the books.
What this has meant is that the evolution of the religions has been quite different. And this has been the strength and weakness of both, too, as I will now explain.
Christianity has been able to evolve throughout its history. Its strength, in evolutionary or memetic terms, is its adaptability. It has been able to adapt to society, such that with scientific, technological, economic and moral progress, Christianity has adapted. We can see this empirically by the fact that there is supposedly some 42,000 denominations of the religion. There is a Christianity for everyone. If you hate gays or love gays; hate slavery or love it; hate capitalism or love it; hate socialism or love it – there is a Christianity for you.
Biblical criticism, especially since reformation times, has been and is encouraged, by and large. The interpretative process is a discipline, and exegetes and theologians disagree quite considerably with each other.
The flipside of this is that the religion of Christianity is somewhat, arguably, bastardised from its purest form, whatever that may be. It has been diluted to adapt to whatever prevalent school of thought requires such. As economics and morality have undergone huge zeitgeists, so too has Christianity. And this might be argued to be its weakness, too.
Islam, however, has been very different. Due to the nature of the holy book, Islam requires that society adapts to IT. Throughout history, Islam has remained a fairly monolithic construction (albeit with political schisms along the Sunni/Shia divide and with other intpertative schools - just fewer of them than with Christianity). For example, in the banking sector, or morally, within the context of its primarily theocratic domain, Islam has not particularly shifted. Lending is outlawed in certain forms, stoning and beheading seem to be still widely accepted in the same form it was (in many places). Sharia law often prevails, and secular Islamic countries are few and far between, if at all ever properly secular (e.g. Turkey).
What this means, in evolutionary or memetic terms, is that Islam requires the environment to adapt to it. It has very little adaptability, changing little in response to environmental constraints (yes, we can argue about fuzzy edges, but you get the picture). So its strength is that it appears a purer religion in comparison to Christianity, and in relation to its earlier forms. The evolution of Christianity against Islam produces two entirely different pictures: one a large, foliage-burdened tree of evolutionary worldviews, the other a more streamlined set of grasses, perhaps.
So when we see the moral paradigm of the modern world, we can see that Christianity is able to mould better to the environment, and Islam struggles. And where Islam and the modern world meet, there is little shaking of hands, and much bloodshed.
Islam needs a reformation, for sure, but I don’t think the holy book context really permits such a much-needed philosophical transformation.
The meaning of the word "Christian" and "Christianity"
As ever, much will depend on the meaning of the word(s) so that to stop anyone claiming to be a Christian (such as myself, for example) there has to be some minimum requirement. We might agree by dictionary consensus that, if I claim to be Christian, it at least means I am...
1. adj: relating to or professing Christianity or its teachings. 2. noun: a person who has received Christian baptism or is a believer in Christianity.
But this is open to a whole heap of subjective interpretation. What are the teachings? If I profess them but don't do them, what then? If I claim them but don't believe them deep down where no one else will know this, what then? What if I think the teachings are really left field in a way that is essentially unrecognisable from any other known Christianity as I use a crazy interpretative lens? Being "a believer in Christianity" becomes a circular definitional problem with no clear resolution. We get back to the definition of Christianity being:
- the religion based on the person and teachings of Jesus Christ, or its beliefs and practices.
The most we can perhaps get from this is that a person who claims they are not a Christian(or who does not claim they are and bears no connection to Christianity) is not a Christian. And everyone else is somehow in...
A Tippling Philosopher
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