Is 'certainty' required of Christians?

[Flail]

Question for debate:
Can one be a true Christian and still have doubts and uncertainty about some or all of the fundamentals of the faith, such as the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the forgiveness of sin, Paul's vision on the road to Damascus, the inerrancy of scripture etc?

[Shermana]

That is more of a matter of doctrinal differences, and ultimately is tantamount to the question of "What is a Christian". The idea of "Fundamentals of the Faith" is as question begging as question begging begets.

Cerinthus for example was accused of not believing in the Virgin birth by Iraneus and others, among other things (though his accusations conflicted at times) and was called a "Gnostic" though his beliefs were nothing like the Sethians and such.

The Nazarenes and Ebionites were no fans of Paul, or the idea that you didn't have to obey the Scripture, or anything remotely close to OSAS.

Iraneus and others had vastly different canons as well. So did Jude apparently, who called "Enoch" "prophetic." The Syrian Orthodox Church seemingly rejected the Pastoral Epistles. The Protestants reject the Apocrypha that the entire mainstream pre-Lutheran "Traditional" establishment accepts. The Ethiopian Church has its own canon. The Muratorian fragment says that the Gospel of Peter was legit, Clement said that the Apocalypse of Peter was legit. Luther discounted Hebrews, Revelation, James, and Jude but was a bit shy of snipping them out lest he lose much of his support.

So this is not so much a matter of being "convinced" as it is being which sect of beliefs, or combination of beliefs thereof, a self-professed "Christian" claims. If you ask me what a "True Christian" is, I'll say something that 99.999% of most self-professed "Christians" and probably 90% of most "Messianic Jews" will fiercely disagree with, but I'd suspect the early Nazarenes and Ebionites would agree with.

[McCulloch]

Question for debate:
Can one be a true Christian and still have doubts and uncertainty about some or all of the fundamentals of the faith, such as the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the forgiveness of sin, Paul's vision on the road to Damascus, the inerrancy of scripture etc?

This is virtually the definition of Christian Fundamentalism. Thus this statement is merely rephrasing the question, "Are the Fundamentalists the only true Christians?"

[Haven]

When I was a (evangelical) Christian, I certainly believed that one had to accept the "fundamentals" of the faith and believe them with certainty in order to be a "true Christian." Once I began questioning the "fundamentals," the whole house of cards fell and I ended up leaving Christianity.

[Moses Yoder]

In my opinion all a person has to do to become a Christian is to be born again. To become born again you have to accept the fact that you are a sinner, repent of your sin, and accept Christ as your savior. "Accepting Christ" means to believe His sacrifice has paid for your sin.

You do not have to believe any other part of the Bible in order to be a Christian.

Once you are born again, you can never be unborn again. If you once called yourself a "Christian" and have now "left the faith", you were never born again.

This is the New International Version, John 10;

27 My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all[a]; no one can snatch them out of my Fathers hand. 30 I and the Father are one.

Note it says God's children shall never perish, nor can anyone snatch them out of God's hand.

[EduChris]

...Can one be a true Christian and still have doubts and uncertainty about some or all of the fundamentals of the faith, such as the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the forgiveness of sin, Paul's vision on the road to Damascus, the inerrancy of scripture etc?...

Firstly, I think a lot of people who consider themselves Christians do not even know what the so-called "fundamentals of the faith" even are. I certainly do not view your list of "fundamentals" as representing anything more than an unreflective parroting of what a minority of recent Christians have put forward.

Secondly, the human condition does not allow us to really be certain of anything. Science cannot even tell us whether our little part of the universe consists of three spatial dimensions, or only two. If we can't even know that, then how could we ever know anything in an absolute and "certain" sense?

What most people--faithful or secular--have are not "certainties" but rather "convictions" or "hopes" or "broad intepretive frameworks" which they hold for various subjective reasons and with varying degrees of attachment. These "convictions" are often fluid, mostly ill-defined, and always culture-bound.

To be a Christian in today's Western culture is to understand that scientific reductionism cannot ever answer the biggest questions, the "why questions"of life. Christians believe that there must be something more than mere scientific reductionism at work in our universe and our selves. Christians find the Biblical representation of God and humanity's relationship to God to be the most compelling portrait available. Christians experience God most deeply in the stories of the Bible, in the fellowship of other Christians, and in the practices of love and service and worship and prayer that they find within the broad Christian tradition.

[Fuzzy Dunlop]

Firstly, I think a lot of people who consider themselves Christians do not even know what the so-called "fundamentals of the faith" even are. I certainly do not view your list of "fundamentals" as representing anything more than an unreflective parroting of what a minority of recent Christians have put forward.

Three of those fundamentals are straight out of the Apostle's Creed (like 1500 years old) - surely you aren't referring to these as things recently put forward by a minority of Christians? Inerrency may be a minority position, but the Resurrection? Paul's conversion?

[EduChris]

...Three of those fundamentals are straight out of the Apostle's Creed (like 1500 years old) - surely you aren't referring to these as things recently put forward by a minority of Christians? Inerrency may be a minority position, but the Resurrection? Paul's conversion?

I was referring to the entire list, not just some subset, or even some superset.

Any words that are written instantly become an artifact. Artifacts will be understood and interpreted differently across various cultures and generations. Within our contemporary Western society, there is no way that any of us can really go back in time and "believe" the Apostles Creed in the same way that people did 1500 years ago. Every culture and every generation has to reinterpret and reappropriate the tradition anew; if it cannot do this, the tradition will die.

[Clownboat]

In my opinion all a person has to do to become a Christian is to be born again. To become born again you have to accept the fact that you are a sinner, repent of your sin, and accept Christ as your savior. "Accepting Christ" means to believe His sacrifice has paid for your sin.

You do not have to believe any other part of the Bible in order to be a Christian.

Once you are born again, you can never be unborn again. If you once called yourself a "Christian" and have now "left the faith", you were never born again.

This is the New International Version, John 10;

27 My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all[a]; no one can snatch them out of my Fathers hand. 30 I and the Father are one.

Note it says God's children shall never perish, nor can anyone snatch them out of God's hand.

Do you have any evidence to support "your claim" (which is not a fact yet until you support it) that I was born a sinner?

I have it on very good authority that I had never sinned before or during birth.

[Yahu]

Question for debate:
Can one be a true Christian and still have doubts and uncertainty about some or all of the fundamentals of the faith, such as the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, the forgiveness of sin, Paul's vision on the road to Damascus, the inerrancy of scripture etc?

Well let me address the inerrancy of scripture. The KJV (and most others) most definitely have translation errors. You HAVE to go back to the original text. In the case of the Old Testament, that means going back to the unvowel pointed original paleo-hebrew.

I like to check Isa 57:9 as a good starting point. It should say 'Molech' instead of 'king'. This is a passage about the Baalim worship outside Jerusalem and the sacrificing of children to Molech in the valley of Hinnom below the grove. It equates doing those sacrifices as 'debasing thyself unto hell'. Burning incense to the 'king' just won't work. Both are spelled MLK in the unvowel pointed Hebrew. It was later mis-pointed by someone that was ignorant of the topic. Molech is used as a proper name but it is a title that means 'king' but has the vowel points for 'shameful king'.

I don't personally have ANY doubts about the contents of the original texts but man has allowed error to creep in. The KJV went through so many translations it isn't funny. Hebrew->Greek->Latin->German->English. That's a lot of room for error.

Here is an example, Lucifer isn't a Hebrew name. It is a title of a pagan sun god. It wasn't even used until the Latin translation to be a name. The Hebrew word is Heylel and just means 'shining one' or 'light bringer' and is a title of the sun god of antiquity. The equivalent in Greek is Pheobus, a title of Apollo which is kind of funny because Revelations says the 'king ie Molech' of the bottomless pit, abyss, is named Apollyon, another spelling of Apollo which means 'the destroyer'. Apollo was 'the destroyer' by insect plagues hence 'Baal-Zebub' or 'lord of the flies' or Baal-hermon, 'Lord of destruction'.