Our Story

• Christians, who worship Jesus as God in the flesh, practice soft monotheism

  • Believe in one God who appears in human form, as distinct from the strict monotheism of Muslims and Jews, who reject the descent of the divine into a human body

• Jesus is said to be “conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died as was buried”

Sin and Salvation

• God created the first man and woman: Adam and Eve, and they resided in the paradise known as the Garden of Eden. They ate the forbidden fruit and as punishment for this “original sin,” Adam and Eve were banished, and sin, suffering, and death entered the world

• Jesus called himself the Son of Man and preached repentance. Jesus was a miracle worker who turned water into wine at a wedding, calmed a raging storm, walked on water, fed vast crowds with meager portions of food, healed the sick, exorcised demons, and raised the dead

• Jesus gathered a group of 12 disciples and went to Jerusalem for the Jewish festival of Passover. He was betrayed by his disciple Judas, and was arrested and beaten almost to death. The Roman governor sentenced him to death by crucifixion. His crime was pretending to be “The King of the Jews”. As he was nailed to a cross he took all human sin on his own sinless frame

• Three days later some of his female followers found his tomb empty, and concluded that he had risen. Jesus appeared alive multiple times, to his followers before ascending to heaven

• Today, Christians affirm that their own bodies will be ressurected when Jesus, the Second Adam, returns in his Second Coming at the end of days

Christianity in Today’s World

• Christianity is now the religion with the most adherents, accounting in 2020 for 32 percent of the world’s population

• The universal church Christians speak about is divided into 3 main branches:

  • Roman Catholicism: looks to authority of the pope in Rome

  • Protestantism: traditionally emphasizes faith over works and biblical authority over church tradition

  • Eastern Orthodoxy: honors the Patriarch of Constantinople (Istanbul)

Christianity 101

• In Christian tradition, the problem is sin, the violations of God’s commandments - wrong thoughts and evil deeds

• “Actual sins” are (what we do) and “original sin” is (what is inherited)

  • Original sin is a fallen state or condition passed down via Adam and Eve to all of humanity like some genetic mutation

• Sin distances us from God, from our fellow humans beings, and from our true selves

• Heaven is defined as a place without sin, so we are barred from heaven unless we find a cure

  • The cure is salvation

  • God responded to the human epidemic of sin by sending his son Jesus Christ into the world. He taught, he healed, and he died a brutal death on a cross. In that death, sin was overcome. Salvation became possible. He also became a sacrificial lamb “who takes away the sins of the world”

  • One way to describe the gateway from sin to salvation is atonement (the reconciliation of a human being with God). atonement also points to how this reconciliation takes place - how human beings and God are made “at one”

• Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians affirm that the gift of salvation offered by Jesus on the cross has to be accepted by human beings, and this acceptance involves both faith and works

  • Christians need to trust in Jesus, but the faithful also need to act - to do good deeds in the world and to participate in Christian sacraments such as the initiation ritual of baptism and the Eurcharist, referred to by Roman Catholics as the Mass

Christianity at a Glance

• Problem: sin

• Solution: salvation from sin

• Techniques: faith and good works (for Roman Catholics); faith alone (for Protestants)

• Exemplars: saints (for Roman Catholics); knights of faith (for Protestants)

Christianity is a tradition in which followers of Jesus Christ are saved from their sins by faith in Jesus Christ or some combination of faith and good works

Christian History

Paul

• Saul was a Jewish tentmaker and Roman citizen of Tarsus

• Upon his conversion to the faith that would become Christianity, he took the name Paul

• He is known as Christianity’s second founder

• “Paul’s teaching that this salvation comes by other-help rather than self-effort influenced Augustine of Hippo and Martin Luther and, through them, both Roman Catholic and Protestant thought” (Prothero 237)

Christianity: A Genealogy

• The Greek term “christianismos,” the root of the English word “Christianity,” first appears in the early second-century letters of Ignatius of Antioch

Christianity in the United States

The Evangelical Century

• Evangelicals trace their roots to the “Grand Itinerant” George Whitefield

• The “Great Awakening” provided a sense of a collective “us” among colonists, preparing the way for the American Revolution

• Participants in the first Great Awakening interpreted their revivals as surprising works of God

  • They saw God as the author of the Great Awakening and its conversions

• The Second Great Awakening, evangelicals read its revival as the not-so-surprising works of human beings who had rejected the predestination theology of the Puritans in favor of a theology more in keeping with the aspirations of a rising middle class

• Also contributed to America’s religious illiteracy, by shifting the focus of Protestantism from doctrine and intellect to experience and the emotions