Book of Kells, Chi Rho folio, c. 800 · public domain

Christianity

Tradition·Founded 30 CE·est. ~2.4 billion worldwide

Judaism → Christianity → 11 branches

Branch
Core tenet of Christianityheld by most

Scripture is God-breathed.

Every branch says the words; none agrees on the mechanics. The Chicago Statement of 1978 made inerrancy on every subject a Protestant boundary marker. Vatican II limited the guarantee to what God wanted put down for the sake of our salvation. The Orthodox read the text only inside the Fathers and the liturgy, and find the question oddly framed.

Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

Everyone quotes the same verse — all scripture is God-breathed — and means different things by it. Fundamentalist and much evangelical Protestantism holds to inerrancy, meaning the text is without error in everything it touches, including history and cosmology; the Chicago Statement of 1978 wrote that position down and made it a test of fellowship in a large slice of American Christianity. Roman Catholic teaching since Dei Verbum in 1965 confines the guarantee to the truth God wanted set down for the sake of our salvation, which leaves room for genre, error in incidentals, and historical-critical scholarship, which Catholic scholars now do a great deal of. Orthodoxy tends to find the whole framing Western: scripture is the church's book, read inside the liturgy and the Fathers, and asking whether it is inerrant apart from that setting is like asking whether a hand is functional apart from an arm. The practical difference shows up on Genesis, on Paul on women, and on whether a Christian may say a biblical author was wrong.

The same ground, other faiths

claims that share this one's ideas
The cave of Hira. Islam · story Read it in full →
The Gathas. Zoroastrianism · scripture Open the book →
L L. Ron Hubbard — the Founder. The Church of Scientology · figure Meet them →
D David Berg, who was never seen. The Family International · figure Meet them →
The Rigveda. Vedic Religion · scripture Open the book →
The Vedas & Upanishads. Hinduism · scripture Open the book →

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