What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionUnearned favor — the divine gives what no effort could purchase.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and The Urantia Movement are both here because each says something this word covers, and what they say may flatly contradict each other. The idea is the place they can be set side by side.
ShelfHow truth arrives
Travels across6 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderThe Urantia Movement · 1955 CE
Turns up as23 tenets · 6 storys · 5 rites · 5 figures
Where it turns up
every faith that holds it, by founding date — time is half real and half rank order, because a straight axis crushes three millennia against the left wall. Hover a dot for the faith.Across the faiths
one family at a time, and every family speaks before any family speaks twice — 19 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 12 faiths of this family hold it
Something in us is bent at the root.
Not that people do wrong, but that they arrive already wanting to. Augustine called it original sin and read it as inherited guilt; the Greek East calls it ancestral sin and inherits mortality without the guilt. Same story, two very different bills.
held by most
Go deeper — context →
The cross did something — and no council ever said what.
Ransom paid to death, a debt settled to God's honour, the penalty borne in our place, the powers publicly defeated, love demonstrated past argument. Christianity defined the Trinity at Nicaea and the two natures at Chalcedon, and left the meaning of the crucifixion undefined for two thousand years.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Grace comes through the sacraments.
Seven of them, baptism to anointing — God working through matter.
Go deeper — context →
Faith and works cooperate.
Salvation is grace lived out in love — precisely the point Luther pressed against.
Go deeper — context →
Justification is by faith alone.
Received, not earned — the article on which the church stands or falls.
Go deeper — context →
Baptism in the Spirit is for every believer.
A second encounter beyond conversion — power for ordinary people.
Go deeper — context →
Law and gospel must not be confused.
The law diagnoses; the gospel saves. Mixing them ruins both.
Go deeper — context →
The king who became a boar.
Agathangelos tells it this way: Trdat had Gregory thrown into the pit at Khor Virap for thirteen years and had the nun Hripsime and her companions killed for refusing him. He was then struck mad and took the form of a boar. His sister dreamed that only the man in the pit could heal him; Gregory was hauled out, healed the king, and Armenia was baptised.
Read it in full — context →
Entire sanctification — God deals with the disposition, not only the record.
The tenth Article of Faith teaches a second work of grace, after conversion, in which the heart is cleansed from original sin and filled with love. It is what the whole denomination exists to keep in circulation, and it is Wesley's doctrine, not a nineteenth-century invention.
Go deeper — context →
Anyone can be saved, and anyone can walk away.
Arminian to the bone: prevenient grace reaches everyone, the will is genuinely free, no one is predestined, and a believer can fall. The Nazarenes came out of the Methodist stream and have never had the slightest interest in the Calvinist alternative.
Go deeper — context →
Nobody says out loud that they are saved.
Assurance of salvation is heard as presumption about God's verdict. The Amish speak of a living hope instead, and an Amish-raised person who joins an evangelical church and announces they are saved is one of the most common causes of a family breach.
held by most
Go deeper — context →
Grace is unconditional.
Chosen before the foundation of the world: election rests on God's will, not foreseen merit.
Go deeper — context →
The fall reaches every human faculty.
Total depravity — not that people are as bad as possible, but that no part of us is untouched enough to save the rest.
held by most
Go deeper — context →
Grace is for every person.
Arminian to the bone: Christ died for all, and no one is excluded by decree.
Go deeper — context →
Holiness is the goal of grace.
Sanctification — the heart perfected in love — pursued deliberately, examined weekly.
Go deeper — context →
Entire sanctification — a second work of grace, and an argued one.
Taken from the Wesleyan holiness movement in the later 1800s: after conversion, a further crisis in which the Spirit cleanses the disposition to sin. Anabaptist-minded members have never been comfortable with it, and the denomination has repeatedly restated it in softer terms.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context →
also here
The Salvation Army
Vedic Religion
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
Grace does the work; your effort is mostly getting out of the way.
Prapatti — surrender — split the Srivaishnava community into two schools that have never reunited. The Tenkalai say the kitten hangs limp and the mother carries it. The Vadakalai say the baby monkey has to hold on. The argument is six hundred years old and still decides which temple you attend.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
The pillar splits.
A demon king cannot be killed by man or beast, indoors or out, by day or night. His son will not stop chanting Vishnu's name, so the father asks whether God is in this pillar — and a lion-headed thing comes out of it at dusk, in a doorway, and opens him across its knees.
Read it in full — context →
The nembutsu — saying the name.
Namo Amituofo. Six syllables, repeated, and by Shinran's reading not even yours to repeat — Amitabha is saying them through you. The most-practised Buddhist act on earth.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
A
Amitabha — the buddha of infinite light.
A vow with a loophole in it: call his name in sincerity and be reborn in his pure land, where awakening is easy. The move that made Buddhism available to people with no time to meditate.
Meet them — context & 1 source →
Marudevi arrives too late to be sad.
She wept a thousand years for the son who left, and went blind. Told he had become the first Tirthankara, she rode out on an elephant to see him in his glory — and somewhere on that road understood exactly what she had been grieving and why it was nothing. She was liberated on the elephant, before reaching him.
Read it in full — context →
M
Marudevi on the elephant.
Rishabhanatha's mother grieved his renunciation for a thousand years and went blind from weeping. Riding an elephant to see him restored to glory, she understood on the way what the whole thing had been about, and was liberated where she sat — the first soul freed in this half-cycle, with no vows, no fasts and no initiation.
Meet them — context →
Islam
— one faith of this family holds it
Someone will speak for you.
On the Day the Prophet intercedes — shafa'a — and most Muslims extend that to prophets, martyrs, the Quran itself, and the friends of God. Salafi scholars accept only intercession requested of God directly, and hold that asking the dead to intercede is precisely what tawhid forbids.
held by most
Go deeper — context →
Mercy outruns wrath.
Every sura but one opens in the name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful — and a hadith holds that His mercy prevails over His anger. Justice is real; mercy is realer.
Go deeper — context & 2 sources →
Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
Grace decides. Effort only puts you in its way.
Nadar and kirpa run through the whole scripture: the Name is a gift, never a wage earned by discipline. Discipline is still demanded, on the reasoning that a cup does not make the rain fall but had better be outside when it does.
Go deeper — context →
The forty who came back.
Forty Sikhs starved out of Anandpur signed a paper saying the Guru was no longer theirs and went home, where the women of their villages — Mai Bhago at the front — refused to have them. They rode back, died fighting at Khidrana, and the Guru tore up their letter over the body of their leader.
Read it in full — context →
The Urantia Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
A fragment of God lives in your mind.
The Thought Adjuster arrives in childhood, is genuinely a piece of the Father, and survives with the person who chooses to survive. It is the book's answer to where God actually is.
Go deeper — context →
Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
In the end everyone is saved.
The developed eschatology has the dead raised, the whole of creation passed through a flood of molten metal — pleasant as warm milk to the good, agonising to the wicked — and then all souls, including those in hell, restored. Evil is not merely defeated but abolished, and hell empties.
held by most
Go deeper — context →
Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
The cross did something — and no council ever said what.
Ransom paid to death, a debt settled to God's honour, the penalty borne in our place, the powers publicly defeated, love demonstrated past argument. Christianity defined the Trinity at Nicaea and the two natures at Chalcedon, and left the meaning of the crucifixion undefined for two thousand years.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Salvation is grace, not wage.
Rescue is received, not earned — how faith and works relate is exactly where the branches divide.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
The altar call.
Charles Finney formalised it in the 1830s with the anxious bench, and it is now how a large share of the world's Christians date their conversion. Critics inside evangelicalism argue it manufactures decisions; it has survived every one of those critiques for two centuries.
Go deeper — context →
Being born again.
A datable before and after. The evangelical tradition treats it as the pivot of a life and asks for the date; the sacramental traditions locate the same change at an infant baptism nobody remembers, and the two have never really understood each other.
Go deeper — context →