“I grew up Catholic, but then I became a Christian.”
I always cringe when I hear such a statement, especially from one of my students after I’ve spent the semester explaining that Christianity (like all religions) is a tradition with several branches.
Catholics are Christians, I explain, as are Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, and Latter-day Saints. Though the differences among these groups are great, they all look to Jesus as Messiah and share certain basic commitments. More importantly, they all claim the name Christian for themselves.
So why do some of my students persist in thinking that Catholic is somehow different from Christian? Or, more frequently, that Latter-day Saints are completely outside the bounds of Christianity?
The main reason is that in contemporary U.S. society, evangelical Protestants dominate the narrative of what counts as Christian. Especially with the rise of nondenominational evangelical churches, many Americans have come to think it’s possible to be “just Christian,” apart from any denominational label. But what may look like generic Christianity is informed by a particular evangelical Protestant take on the Bible and theology.
Consider the biennial “State of Theology” survey released earlier this fall by two evangelical organizations, Ligonier Ministries and Lifeway Research. Based on a sample of 3,011 Americans, the survey is meant to gauge Americans’ orthodoxy on key theological questions. According to a news report from Christianity Today, the survey found that “adults in the US are moving away from orthodox understandings of God and his Word,” as evident by the fact that “half the country (53%) now believes Scripture ‘is not literally true,’ up from 41 percent when the biannual survey began in 2014.”
But whose orthodoxy are Americans abandoning? In mainline Protestant circles, for example, it’s possible to be fully orthodox and still reject the notion that all of Scripture is “literally true,” whatever that means in specific cases. Similarly, Catholicism takes a dim view of fundamentalist Protestant biblical literalism. In “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church” (1993), the Pontifical Biblical Commission criticized Protestant fundamentalism for treating certain biblical texts as historical that never claimed to be history in the first place. Fundamentalism, the commission said, wrongly “accepts the literal reality of an ancient, out-of-date cosmology simply because it is found expressed in the Bible.”
The “State of Theology” report also raised an alarm about Americans’ allegedly heretical views of human nature. The survey found that 71 percent of Americans and 65 percent of evangelicals believe that “everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God.” The report lamented this rejection of the “biblical” teaching of original sin.
But here too there’s significant disagreement among Christians. While Reformed Protestants may speak of “total depravity,” which includes both the sinful nature and the guilt purportedly inherited from Adam and Eve, Eastern Orthodox and Latter-day Saints Christians reject the notion that humans are born guilty and completely debilitated. That’s because Christians have always disagreed on the interpretation of Adam and Eve’s sin in Genesis 3.
Finally, the survey found that 51 percent of Americans and 48 percent of evangelicals believe that God “learns and adapts to different circumstances.” The report blamed this supposed misconception on “a lack of clear biblical teaching” and on the influence of Process Theology and Open Theism, two movements which teach that God changes through interaction with the world.
But Process Theology isn’t a dirty word to all Christians. Especially in mainline Protestantism, it underlies much contemporary eco-theology. And Open Theism began not among liberals but among evangelicals who noticed that God changes his mind some 40 times in the Bible. One instance is Exodus 32:14, which says that “the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people” (NRSV).
The bottom line is that on many important questions of Christian theology, there’s no single standard. The Ligonier-Lifeway orthodoxy is a brand of Calvinist evangelicalism masquerading as generic biblical Christianity. Seductive as it is to think that such a thing exists, the reality is more complicated.
Just as the Bible doesn’t present a single theological perspective throughout, Christianity itself is a tradition of considerable diversity. For religious people, that diversity is not so much a problem as an opportunity to think more clearly—and speak more precisely—about their own doctrinal commitments.
© 2022 by Peter J. Thuesen. All rights reserved
Bibliographical Note
On the Eastern Christian rejection of inherited guilt, see Eve Tibbs, A Basic Guide to Eastern Orthodox Theology: Introducing Beliefs and Practices (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2021), 103-105; on Latter-day Saint views, see Peter J. Thuesen, Predestination: The American Career of a Contentious Doctrine (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 127-29. On God’s 40 changes of mind in the Bible, see Terence E. Fretheim, Creation Untamed: The Bible, God, and Natural Disasters (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2010), 59.
Illustration credit: Pope Francis photographed by Long Thien (Wikimedia Commons)