The World's Christians. Douglas Jacobsen

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      Different communities of Christians have different opinions about some aspects of salvation, including whether human effort is required (or whether God does everything) and how quickly salvation happens (all at once or slowly over time). Despite these differences, all (or almost all) Christians agree that the Christian life includes an ongoing dynamic of confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Christians are instructed to confess their sins (to acknowledge and name their moral failures), they are told to seek forgiveness for these sinful acts from both God and the people they have hurt, and they are encouraged to act in ways that will allow them to be fully reconciled with God and the people they have harmed. Many Christian churches build this dynamic of confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation into their formal religious practices, a process which often involves a priest or pastor acting as one’s “confessor” (a person who hears an individual’s confession of sin and forgives that person in God’s name). Other churches expect individuals to take care of these matters on their own without the help of a priest. Obviously not all Christians follow this practice of self‐examination, confession, and reconciliation with equal rigor, but it is central to the theology of how Christians are supposed to live.

      Sacraments: Most Christians believe that God’s grace is uniquely communicated to human beings through specific formal practices of the church; these rituals are typically called sacraments. The two most important Christian sacraments are baptism and the Eucharist. Baptism is the ritual of initiation that marks a person as a follower of Jesus, and it involves either submerging a person in water or pouring water over a person’s head. Baptism is seen as washing away sins committed in the past and as initiating the recipient into a new spiritual life (sometimes called the “new birth”). Some churches baptize babies while others baptize only adults, but baptism in one form or another is practiced by almost all Christians worldwide. Often, it is considered a prerequisite for salvation.

The other major sacrament is the Eucharist, which is also known as Communion, the Lord’s Supper, or Mass. The Eucharist is a symbolic meal that takes place near the end of a Christian worship service. It occurs regularly in most churches and involves eating a small piece of bread and taking a sip of wine (or, in some churches, grape juice). The Eucharist commemorates the last meal that Jesus ate with his disciples, and the bread and wine represent Christ’s body that was broken and his blood that was shed on the cross. Many Christians believe that the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ during the Eucharistic celebration even though they continue to look and taste like bread and wine. The meaning of the ritual of the Eucharist is understood differently by different Christians, but at the least it reminds participants that they are part of a community of mutual care and affection and it is also seen as a form of spiritual sustenance that somehow feeds the soul and empowers individuals to live Christianly.

      Christian Traditions

      Christians worldwide share a number of very important beliefs and practices, but there are wide variations regarding how these core convictions of faith are interpreted. Over time, different groups of Christians have developed different shared assumptions about how Christian beliefs should be understood and how Christian practices should be performed. These differing communities of interpretation are called traditions.

      The word “tradition” comes from the Latin word traditio, which means “handing down,” and Christian traditions represent different packages of beliefs, practices, and spiritual attitudes and emotions that have been handed down from generation to generation for years and sometimes for centuries. To call something “traditional” implies that it has always been the same, that it is changeless. In reality, traditions are always changing, but generally they change slowly. A religious tradition is like a long, multigenerational conversation in which each new generation adds its own insights and concerns to the mix, sometimes affirming and sometimes critiquing or revising what was done in the past. Over the course of two millennia, Christianity has produced a number of major traditions, each with its own distinct ways of interpreting Christian beliefs, practices, and spiritual affections.

      Today four mega‐traditions dominate the Christian landscape, and together they account for roughly 99 percent of all Christians worldwide: Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Pentecostalism (including the Charismatic movement). Roughly half of the world’s Christians are part of the Roman Catholic Church. Protestants and Pentecostal Christians each make up about 20 percent of the global Christian population, and slightly more than 10 percent of the world’s Christians are Orthodox.

      All four of these four mega‐traditions have numerous sub‐traditions within them. This is most obvious within Protestantism where the different sub‐traditions (or “denominations”) have names like Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist or Presbyterian. But a similar internal diversity exists within the other mega‐traditions, including Catholicism where, for example, Catholics oriented toward Jesuit ideas and practices may differ considerably from Catholics oriented toward Benedictine, Dominican or Franciscan ideas and values. While it is important to be aware of this internal variety within the four mega‐traditions, the focus here will be on what distinguishes Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Protestants, and Pentecostal Christians from each other, not on these smaller sub‐traditions.

      A handful of Christian groups do not fit neatly into any of these four traditions. For example, about half a million Christians belong to an ancient tradition known as the Church of the East. In the year 700, the Church of the East was one of Christianity’s mega‐traditions and comprised about a quarter of the world’s Christian population, but its size and influence has diminished over the centuries. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS), sometimes known as Mormons, is another Christian group that exists outside the four mega‐traditions of Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Pentecostalism. Founded in the nineteenth century, the LDS affirms several unique beliefs about God and the historical Jesus that set it apart from other Christian churches. There are more than sixteen million Mormons worldwide, making them much larger than today’s Church of the East, but in global perspective the LDS Church is still only a very small movement, accounting for less than 1 percent of all Christians globally.

Within the overarching category of being Christian, most Christian individuals see themselves as belonging to one and only one of the four contemporary mega‐traditions. Typically, a person is either Orthodox or Catholic or Protestant or Pentecostal. But while this general rule of thumb rings true for most Christians, there is sometimes fuzziness at the boundaries between these groups. For example, some people think of themselves as both Orthodox and Catholic because they are members of Catholic Churches that use an Orthodox (or “eastern rite”) liturgy for worship. Other Christians consider themselves to be both Catholic and Protestant, most notably “Anglo‐Catholic” members of the Church of England.

      This mixing of Christian identities is especially common at the borders where the Pentecostal tradition touches the Protestant and Catholic traditions, and there are literally millions of Christians who consider themselves to be both Catholic and Charismatic, or both Protestant and Pentecostal, at the same time. These overlapping identities contribute to the complexity of counting the numbers of Christians who belong to each of the four traditions. In the population numbers that appear in The World’s Christians half of these doubly oriented Christians have been assigned to the Pentecostal category and half have been counted as members of the other tradition that defines their dual Christian identity (either Catholic or Protestant).

      Each of the four contemporary Christian mega‐traditions had a beginning point, but the particular date of birth is not always easy to identify. The Pentecostal movement is the youngest and easiest to date. Most historians associate the birth of this tradition with the Azusa Street Revival, which took place in Los Angeles, California from 1906 to 1908. The Protestant movement is the next youngest, and its birth date is sometimes given as October 31, 1517, the day when Martin Luther issued his famous 95 Theses protesting the practices of the Roman Catholic Church. The origins of the Catholic СКАЧАТЬ