Trinitarians assert that Jesus was fully God and fully human. That the two "persons" were separate and not intermixed (one could die, get hungry, feel physical pain and the other wouldn't). Which of these two was sent by "the father"? Which of these two received authority as spoken in Matthew 28:18-19?

Some Christians, particularly in the United States, believe that America has a divine obligation to support or defend the modern state of Israel. This belief is often linked to the promise in **Genesis 12:3**, where God says to Abraham, *“I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse.”* Is this verse the primary theological basis for that belief?

There is much discussion in secular academia about the possibility/impossibility of Christ being Deity. But there are also sects *within religious circles* who dismiss the idea of Christ really being Deity! Some of those sects fly their flag under the banner of ***Christianity.*** Since the word "Christian" is commonly defined as "one who is a faithful disciple of Christ", then it follows that such a one should believe all that Jesus claimed, ***including His claim to Deity.*** (Also recognized as such by the Apostles.) >Anyone who has seen Me has seen the Father...Believe Me when I say that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me... (John 14:9, 11) >My Father is always at work to this very day, and I too, am working.
For this reason the Jews tried all the harder to kill Him...He was even calling God His own Father, making Himself equal with God. (John 5:17-18) >He is the [visible] image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all Creation. For by Him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. (Colossians 1:15-17) >For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form... (Colossians 2:9) >The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His Being, sustaining all things by His powerful Word. (Hebrews 1:3) >Jesus said to those who believed on Him, "***If you continue in My word***, then you are My disciples indeed." (John 8:31) Since Jesus's "word" included His claim to Deity, can a person ever be called a "Christian" who does not subscribe to believing Jesus is God? ***What is the consensus of Evangelical Protestants in this matter of importance?*** Can sects that deny the Deity of Christ still be considered under the umbrella of "Christianity"? or be considered a "Christian religion"?

I was in a debate with someone recently who claimed that "God does not require governments to follow Christian behaviour", even if those governments are composed of Christians, are elected by Christians, and explicitly call themselves Christian. The claim is that this means it's OK for Christians to vote for a government that violates Christian behaviour on a regular basis. I'm interested in arguments *against* this position, and in order not to make this question an argument let's restrict ourselves to reasons that governments *should* (in general) follow Christian teaching. I'm aware that there will be some things that governments are permitted to do that a private individual shouldn't, like enforce the law or go to war, but I'm not talking about those. I'm interested in countering the idea that governments may do anything they like, no matter how much it contradicts Christian teaching. Answers from a Protestant viewpoint preferred, especially Evangelical Protestant.

> Ge 2:17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely **die**. (KJV) The penalty for sin is death. > Ge 3/19 In the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. **For dust you are and to dust you will return**.” Death means going back to the dust of the ground. Ao, Will Adam and Eve be resurrected to **eternal life ** and why do you answer that way? This question is for mainstream evangelicals. ----- > John 17:3 And this is **life eternal**, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. (KJV)

I've been hearing some tributes to Rev. Billy Graham today and one of the things that people were praising him was that he "emphasized people over religion". Now I'm guessing that is not necessarily the Catholic definition of religion which is "the virtue of reconnecting with God". So, it seems to me, based mainly off of my interactions with Evangelicals here and listening to Christian Radio that religion is either bad or a necessary evil. But is this what Evangelicals truly believe? Are they always talking about organized religious ceremonies when they say "religion"? Is there a concrete definition of what religion is, according to Evangelicals?

It appears that the term "evangelical" is one of the most used category of Christians referred to today, but also the least well-defined, imho. On this website, I found an article talking about how the term is used opposite the term "fundamentalist", and sometimes in concert with that same word. It has also been used opposite the term "liberal", implying that one can't be liberal and evangelical. But I'm not sure that is the case either. So how do I know if someone is evangelical? If I ask a Christian, will they know if they are evangelical? It seems absurd that we have this word that is thrown around so much but almost no one can tell me who exactly fits in that category.

I know the word itself means "of or related to the gospel." That's not what I'm talking about. I mean, when the term is used to refer to a subset of Christians, what are the characteristics being implied? What is the criteria used to determine what Christians are "Evangelicals" and which ones aren't?

I came across a blog author [Matthew Bryan](https://conciliarpost.com/author/matthew-bryan/) who self-identify as a "post-Protestant", a term that I encountered for the first time. When I Googled what "post-Protestant" means, I came across [this entry](https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Post-Protestant) from *religion.wikia.org*: > Post-Protestantism is the movement in 20th century and 21st Christianity to even further remove Christian faith from the influence and traditions of the Roman Catholic church and "her sister churches" (traditional, mainline, liturgical Protestant denominations dating back mostly to the 1600s and 1700s). > > Many of these "post-Protestant" churches refer to themselves simply as "Christian", or nondenominational, but also commonly use the terms "Church of", followed by such words as "God", "Christ", "Jesus", "The Bible", etc. The trend was the natural outgrowth of the evangelical and fundamentalist movements of the earlier 20th century (1900s), and partly includes, but is not limited to, Restorationists and the Community Church movement, who refer to themselves as being post-Protestant and postdenominational. > > These leaders of these often promote points of view which are anti-intellectual, or at least ahistorical, to the point that they totally deny or are even oblivious to the history of Christian denominations, and the meaning of the word Protestant (which essentially, is any Christian who is not a Roman Catholic, Eastern Catholic, or Eastern Orthodox Christian). This often adds to the confusion and ignorance of people who mistakenly believe that only churches with the words "Christian", "Christ", or "Jesus" in the name are Christian, and that Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Catholics, etc. are something else. I'm looking for a good article from either a religious studies scholar or a Christian / church that self-identify as "post-Protestant" that can do at least a few of the following: - explain why they don't simply use the term "non-denominational" or "evangelical" - describe specific hermeneutical principles that they use to interpret Bible, which distinguish them from evangelicals - describe their understanding of *sola scriptura* since they seem to reject mainstream Protestant (and even some evangelical!) use of the early church councils to narrow down certain interpretation of the Bible (for example, to reject non-Trinitarian interpretation) - describe several theological positions that unite them as a group (for example, their view of the Lord's supper, baptism, and gifts of the Holy Spirit) - speak for others who identify as "post-Protestant"

Recently, I have noticed a trend here of people fighting to deny self-identifying Christians who deny parts of the Nicene creed the label Christian. I am of course talking about LDS and I guess the part that is denied is consubstantiality(??). Anyway, this question is not about whether or not LDS are Christians, it's just the context of the question. Christian seems to me like a label that should be applied to those professing to follow Jesus Christ, independent of other doctrinal differences!? I found this question which deals with whether Catholics are Christians according to evangelicals , but I am not completely happy with the answers because they revolve around being born again, which is personal, as opposed to doctrinal points which seem to be the issue when you deny whole groups the label. Is there any theological significance attached to the label that causes this reluctance to grant the label Christian (according to evangelicals)? Or are there non-theological reasons?

> As in the case of Baptism and Confirmation this share in Christ's office is granted once for all. the sacrament of Holy Orders, like the other two, confers an indelible spiritual character and cannot be repeated or conferred temporarily (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1582) A 1954 Time magazine article citing Rev. Daniel A. Poling estimated that, in the decade prior, as many as 4 million Catholics converted to Protestantism. This is from a 2015 Pew research article on "faith switching": > One-in-five people who were raised Catholic now say they have no religious affiliation, while 10% identify with evangelical denominations, 5% with mainline denominations and smaller numbers with other faiths. My question is: What is the Catholic view of those very many (multiple millions) of Baptized and Confirmed Roman Catholics who have later (in adult life) had the experience of being saved in the evangelical sense? ________________________________________________________________________ Definition: Evangelicals believe that salvation is a personal and transformative experience that involves a "born-again" encounter with Jesus Christ. This experience is considered a passage from spiritual death to spiritual life. It encompasses all the abiding and immediate effects (albeit some of the language is different) that are supposed to have been conferred in Catholic Baptism and Confirmation, especially the immediate results (copied from this question ), such as: Abiding Effects Baptism: Incorporates us into Christ and his Church Baptism: Capacity to receive other sacraments Baptism: God's life, the life of the Holy Spirit Confirmation: Configuration to Christ's priesthood Confirmation: seals our souls like armor so that we can be knights in combat for Christ Immediate Results Baptism: Forgiveness of sin Baptism: Bestowal of Sanctifying Grace Baptism: Infusion of the Supernatural Virtues Baptism: Infusion of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit Baptism: Conferral of Actual Graces Confirmation: Grace of mature, Christian witness Confirmation: Grace of spiritual soldiery

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 7:10 ([NKJV](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+7%3A10&version=NKJV)) : > Now to the married I command, **yet not I but the Lord**: A wife is not to depart from her husband In [verse 12](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+7%3A12&version=NKJV) Paul writes: > But to the rest **I, not the Lord**, say: If any brother has a wife who does not believe, and she is willing to live with him, let him not divorce her. How do Evangelicals explain this in line with scripture inspired by God?

One thing that makes me doubt is contemporary biblical scholarship consensus and academic biblical teachings. Some of their teachings are irreconcilable with faith. Yes Im flirting with becoming an evangelical Fundie & I would love the bible to be literally perfect & infallible. But even if one is not a evangelical Fundie it should matter if the bible on the whole is correct. Because Jesus confirmed the Old Testament & by denying this the New Testament and Jesus gift of eternal life is invalid, too. I know there are also conservative scholars but those are not many and the scholarly consensus is eating them up alive. To dismiss biblical scholar consensus as theories without proof seems too easy and also unfair bc its a science in which loads of hard work was done and many people brooded over it a long time.

Heb 4:12: > For the **word of God** is **living** and effective and sharper than any double-edged sword, penetrating as far as the separation of soul and spirit, joints and marrow. **It is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.** (CSB) > For the **word of God** is **quick**, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and **is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart**. (KJV) is quoted a lot by evangelicals in promoting devotional Bible study as though *the act of reading the Bible text in itself* produces the benefit that the Pastor of the book of Hebrews mentions in the verse, i.e. "judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart". But technically, isn't it true that it is **NOT** the text on paper that "judges" but **Jesus (God the Word)** speaking to us? Jesus is the one living, not the text. The theme of the sermon makes it clear what "word of God" refers to, *cf* Heb 1:1-2: > Long ago God spoke to our ancestors by the **prophets** at different times and in different ways. In these last days, **he has spoken to us by his Son**. God has appointed him heir of all things and **made the universe through him**. (CSB) > God, who at sundry times and in divers manners **spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets**, Hath in these last days **spoken unto us by his Son**, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds; (KJV) which more precisely refers to the words God spoke by the OT prophets, culminating in His word by Jesus's body, life, action, and words. V. 2 alludes to the words through which God spoke creation into existence (Gen 1) that the Pastor implied as "through Jesus". It seems clear to me that proper exegesis should center the referent of "the word of God" in Heb 4:12 on Jesus who *indeed* is **living and present** preaching to us through the various ways alluded by Heb 1:1-2: - prophecy to OT fathers by the prophets - voice of our conscience (part of the created order), - the beauty & order of nature herself (testified in Job, Psalms, etc.) rather than ***ONLY*** through the words of the text of the Bible (though of course the Bible is the inscripturated word of God also). Furthermore, the more immediate context of Heb 4:12 is Heb 3:1-4:13 about the warning from the lesson learned at Kadesh Barnea's rebellion where they didn't heed the word of God delivered through Moses. Thus the warning of that passage is so that we heed Christ's words to our soul TODAY (*cf* frequent reference to Ps 95:7-8) now that God has spoken to us a lot more clearly by sending Jesus, His own incarnation, greater than the word He spoke to Moses. So why do Evangelicals, whenever they cite the verse in many sermons, Bible study guides, proof-text for apologetics, etc., regularly shift the referent of Heb 4:12 from Jesus to the text of the Bible itself, even broadening the scope to the NT text that has *yet* to be recognized as Scripture? ### 2 illustrations of the consequence of bad exegesis I think my concern for my evangelical brothers and sisters is important when considering **the two disturbing practices I notice** which seems directly to follow from this bad Evangelical exegesis: 1. In several evangelical churches I have attended, they imply that to obtain the benefit in Heb 4:12b, reading the Bible text in itself *is more efficacious* than other books (such as a good theology book, the Catechism, or a C.S. Lewis book), as though God works in a MORE SPECIAL MANNER in producing the benefit when the text read is the Bible but not other books. They seem fearful as though theology books can be more corrupting than the effect of uninformed straight reading of the Bible that has the risk of bad private interpretation if not checked by the church's interpretation mediated by the pastor's sermons. Some even eschew using a commentary, fearing that the commentator's interpretation obscures Scripture rather than making it brighter to the mind! To me this is not coherent. Doesn't the **agent** need to be someone LIVING rather than words on a page? But Evangelical careful readers (adopting the Berean discernment) certainly prioritize the teaching in Scripture to serve as a norm and a rule to judge whether a book elucidate or distorts the orthodox teachings of the Bible. Thus they pick and choose better parts of C.S. Lewis books and quote judiciously from writers such as Dallas Willard / A.W. Tozer. When a Christian reading those books became convicted of their sins and obtained more wisdom to know their hearts more clearly (thus obtaining the benefit of Heb 4:12b), can we *not* say it was Jesus speaking through those books? Can we *not* say it was Jesus speaking through a Biblical sermon prepared with lots of research including the use of commentaries, philosophy, and theology books? No one is going to mistake those books as "word of God", put them on the same level as the Bible, or attribute the author or the pastor as "Jesus speaking". By the way, I am in no way disputing the status of the text of the Bible as Scripture, nor am I excluding Scripture from the "word of God". Evangelical doctrines of - Verbal inspiration of Scripture - Infallibility of Scripture - *Sola Scriptura* as the norm for interpreting other sources such as tradition, council canons, patristic writings, church doctrines, post-NT prophecies, etc. - Protestant understanding of canon of "recognition" instead of Magisterium can be derived from other parts of the Bible instead of misusing this verse in support of the above, which in turn make the above doctrines stand on a less secure foundation. 1. The advice I got from several fundamentalist leaning evangelicals is that to evangelize you HAVE to look for an opportunity to cite a series of strategic Bible verses as though by the very act of reading them aloud to the non-Christian you're speaking to, the Holy Spirit can work BETTER in convicting him/her. One such sequence is this: 1. Romans 10:9 1. John 1:12 1. John 3:36 1. Rev 3:20 1. Rom 6:23 They say I am NOT supposed to let my own explanation to cloud over the reciting of those verses, even explanation of the CONTEXT of each verse! Nor is it necessary to let him/her talk about his/her current misunderstanding of the gospel or the difficulties he/she has with Christianity. **One should simply recite the verses to let them "work" in the hearer's heart unmediated by explanation**. I think I'm justified to say that this practice is adding a mystical element to the Bible text itself, as though the text has mystical power akin to incantation. So my question is: **Why do evangelicals tend to conflate "word of God" in Heb 4:12 with the "text of Scripture", thus with a meaning that ascribes animacy and agency to the words of the Bible text instead of to the Living God?**

I came across a recent [*Christianity Today* article](https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2024/july-august/theological-unity-diversity-lausanne-covenant.html) highlighting the importance of the forgotten [1974 Lausanne Covenant](https://lausanne.org/statement/lausanne-covenant) for the unity of the many factions of evangelicalism WITHOUT requiring doctrinal uniformity. For example, no agreement on Baptism or on the issue of female minister is needed for its signatories. My question: Is there anything in the covenant that contradict a Catholic doctrine, or is it mainstream enough that a Catholic can sign it?

To explain what I mean by "very interactive, intimate, and personal friend", let me quote some excerpts from T.M. Luhrmann's book *[When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God](https://www.amazon.com/When-God-Talks-Back-Understanding/dp/0307277275)* . From the book's synopsis: > Combined with scientific research that studies the effect that intensely practiced prayer can have on the mind, ***When God Talks Back* examines how normal, sensible people—from college students to accountants to housewives, all functioning perfectly well within our society—can attest to having the signs and wonders of the supernatural become as quotidian and as ordinary as laundry**. From the book itself: > I set out many years ago to understand how God becomes real for modern people. I chose an example of the style of Christianity that would seem to make the cognitive burden of belief most difficult: **the evangelical Christianity in which God is thought to be present as a person in someone’s everyday life, and in which God’s supernatural power is thought to be immediately accessible by that person**. The Vineyard Christian Fellowship is a new denomination, a few decades old, and it represents this shift in the American imagination of God. **These Christians speak as if God interacts with them like a friend. He speaks to them. He listens to them. He acts when they pray to him about little mundane things, because he cares**. This kind of Christianity seems almost absurdly vivid to someone who grew up in a mainstream Protestant church; when I first encountered it, I imagined that people thought of God as if he were a supernatural buddy with a thunderbolt. > The Americans in this church are ordinary Americans. They are typically middle class, but one finds very wealthy and very poor people in the congregations. They are typically white, but the congregations include many minorities. Most participants are college-educated. The church took form in California, but there are now more than six hundred churches across the country and as many as fifteen hundred around the world. **The Vineyard is arguably the most successful example of what one sociologist has called new paradigm Protestantism, the infusion of a more intensely expressive spirituality into white, middle-class Christianity.** **This style of spirituality has also been called neo-Pentecostal because it represents the adoption of a Pentecostal ethos, and its flamboyant emphasis on the direct experience of God, into a form acceptable to the white mainstream**. Another name is *renewalist*. According to a recent survey, **nearly one-quarter of all Americans embrace a Christian spirituality in which congregants experience God immediately, directly, and personally**. The Vineyard typifies this powerful new impulse in American spirituality. > The reason people have their notebooks out during sermons isn’t because the sermon is about God, the way a college lecture is about the American Revolution or the poems of Emily Dickinson. Rather, the pastor’s sermon teaches the congregation to use the Bible to relate to God, **both as a God of power and as a best friend**. **Church is a class in which you learn how to hear what God has to say. The pastor teaches that when you are intimate and personal with a supernatural being, God speaks to you. Not all the time and usually not audibly, but in as real and as practical a way as if you were sitting down to coffee with a puzzle you had to solve.** > **Elaine told me that she was trying to hear God speak in the little things, so that she could hear his voice when it really counted. She began to ask him what she should wear every morning. The Sunday we spoke, God told her—as she experienced it—to wear the blue shirt**. But when she put it on, her bra showed, so she took off the blue shirt and put on a black one. When she arrived at church, she was standing around with the worship team. The pastor walked by, smiled, and said (she reported), “I see you are all wearing blue today.” Elaine told me this story to illustrate how mortified she was at having not taken God seriously. The real point, of course, was that Elaine—a deeply committed Christian who had repeatedly explained to me that every word of the Bible was accurate—did not, as she stared at her closet, treat her inference about what God was thinking (“wear the blue shirt”) as an actual insight into divine intention. She thought she had just imagined it. > **The evangelical interest in the direct personal experience of God exploded in the 1960s**. Americans have always been religious, but every so often our religious enthusiasm seems to crest. **Historians have called these periods of religious excitement “great awakenings.”** They appear (more or less) from 1730 to 1760, 1800 to 1840, 1890 to 1930, and 1965 to the present. **During these decades, Americans were more likely to have had unusual spiritual experiences in which they fainted, spoke in tongues, saw visions, and so forth, and they were more likely to seek out and publicly celebrate these changes in consciousness as proof of God’s living presence in their lives**. These are not, of course, the only times when God has inflamed the American senses. Throughout the twentieth century, there were American churches that encouraged and even relied on unusual spiritual phenomena. Pentecostalism was born in Los Angeles in the early twentieth century and continued to grow over the decades. Southern Baptist churches encouraged richly spiritual experience well before the late twentieth century. Nevertheless, America does seem to have periods when great spiritual passion enters many humble homes. We are, scholars suggest, in such a period now. --- What is an overview of Christian views on the practice of relating to God as a very interactive, intimate, and personal friend?

I'm referring to T.M. Luhrmann's book *[When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God](https://www.amazon.com/When-God-Talks-Back-Understanding/dp/0307277275)* . The book's synopsis states: > A bold approach to understanding the American evangelical experience from an anthropological and psychological perspective by one of the country's most prominent anthropologists. > > Through a series of intimate, illuminating interviews with various members of the Vineyard, an evangelical church with hundreds of congregations across the country, Tanya Luhrmann leaps into the heart of evangelical faith. Combined with scientific research that studies the effect that intensely practiced prayer can have on the mind, When God Talks Back examines how normal, sensible people—from college students to accountants to housewives, all functioning perfectly well within our society—can attest to having the signs and wonders of the supernatural become as quotidian and as ordinary as laundry. Astute, sensitive, and extraordinarily measured in its approach to the interface between science and religion, Luhrmann's book is sure to generate as much conversation as it will praise. Have Evangelical Christians published reviews of this book? If so, how do they respond to the way Luhrmann describes and theorizes about their relationship with God? --- **Appendix - A big quote from *When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God*, Kindle Edition** > I grew up among all these good people whom I loved, and I saw that some of them took there to be something in the world that the others did not see, and their mutual incomprehension seemed deeper and more powerful than just knowing different information about the world. Later on, when I became a professor and taught a seminar on divinity and spirituality, I saw again the blank incomprehension that had startled me when I was young—decent, smart, empathic people who seemed to stare at each other across an abyss. **The skeptics did not understand the believers, and the believers did not understand the skeptics. They did not even know how to get from here to there.** > > **I set out many years ago to understand how God becomes real for modern people. I chose an example of the style of Christianity that would seem to make the cognitive burden of belief most difficult: the evangelical Christianity in which God is thought to be present as a person in someone’s everyday life, and in which God’s supernatural power is thought to be immediately accessible by that person**. The Vineyard Christian Fellowship is a new denomination, a few decades old, and it represents this shift in the American imagination of God. These Christians speak as if God interacts with them like a friend. He speaks to them. He listens to them. He acts when they pray to him about little mundane things, because he cares. **This kind of Christianity seems almost absurdly vivid to someone who grew up in a mainstream Protestant church**; when I first encountered it, I imagined that people thought of God as if he were a supernatural buddy with a thunderbolt. > > The Americans in this church are ordinary Americans. They are typically middle class, but one finds very wealthy and very poor people in the congregations. They are typically white, but the congregations include many minorities. Most participants are college-educated. The church took form in California, but there are now more than six hundred churches across the country and as many as fifteen hundred around the world. The Vineyard is arguably the most successful example of what one sociologist has called new paradigm Protestantism, the infusion of a more intensely expressive spirituality into white, middle-class Christianity. **This style of spirituality has also been called neo-Pentecostal because it represents the adoption of a Pentecostal ethos, and its flamboyant emphasis on the direct experience of God, into a form acceptable to the white mainstream**. Another name is renewalist. According to a recent survey, nearly one-quarter of all Americans embrace a Christian spirituality in which congregants experience God immediately, directly, and personally. The Vineyard typifies this powerful new impulse in American spirituality. > > For over two years, I went to weekly services at a Vineyard in Chicago, attended local conferences and special worship sessions, joined a weekly house group for a year, and formally interviewed more than thirty members of the church about their experience of God. That is the anthropological method: we anthropologists learn, or at least we try to learn, from the inside out. We observe, we participate, and we converse, for hours and hours on end. After several years in Chicago, I moved to California and found another Vineyard to join. Again I joined a small group that met weekly, and again I went to conferences and retreats, and I interviewed congregants willing to talk to me about God. I was there for over two years. Members of these churches became my friends and confidants. I liked them. I thought they liked me. They knew I was an anthropologist, and as they came to know me, they became comfortable talking with me at length about God. I have sought to understand what they said. > > **What I have to offer is an account of how you get from here to there**. The tool of an anthropologist’s trade is careful observation—participant observation, a kind of naturalist’s craft in which one watches what people do and listens to what they say and infers from that how they come to see and know their world. I am, more precisely, a psychological anthropologist: I add to my toolkit the experimental method of the psychologist, which I use to explore the constraints on the way people make meaning. At one point I ran a psychological experiment, to test whether my hunch that spiritual practice had an impact on the mind’s process was true. (It was.) But mostly I watched and I listened, and I tried to understand as an outsider how an insider to this evangelical world was able to experience God as real. > > It didn’t have much to do with belief per se. Skeptics sometimes imagine that becoming a religious believer means acquiring a belief the way you acquire a new piece of furniture. You decide you need a table for the living room, so you purchase it and get it delivered and then you have to rearrange everything, but once it’s done, it’s done. **I did not find that being or becoming a Christian was very much like that. The propositional commitment that there is a God—the belief itself—is of course important. In some ways it changes everything, and the furniture of the mind is indeed distinctively rearranged. But for the people I spent time with, learning to know God as real was a slow process, stumbling and gradual, like learning to speak a foreign language in an unfamiliar country, with new and different social cues.** > > **In fact, what I saw was that coming to a committed belief in God was more like learning to do something than to think something. I would describe what I saw as a theory of attentional learning—that the way you learn to pay attention determines your experience of God. More precisely, I will argue that people learn specific ways of attending to their minds and their emotions to find evidence of God, and that both what they attend to and how they attend changes their experience of their minds, and that as a result, they begin to experience a real, external, interacting living presence**. > > **In effect, people train the mind in such a way that they experience part of their mind as the presence of God**. **They learn to reinterpret the familiar experiences of their own minds and bodies as not being their own at all—but God’s. They learn to identify some thoughts as God’s voice, some images as God’s suggestions, some sensations as God’s touch or the response to his nearness. They construct God’s interactions out of these personal mental events, mapping the abstract concept “God” out of their mental awareness into a being they imagine and reimagine in ways shaped by the Bible and encouraged by their church community**. **They learn to shift the way they scan their worlds, always searching for a mark of God’s presence, chastening the unruly mind if it stubbornly insists that there is nothing there. Then they turn around and allow this sense of God—an external being they find internally in their minds—to discipline their thoughts and emotions. They allow the God they learn to experience in their minds to persuade them that an external God looks after them and loves them unconditionally.** > > **To do this, they need to develop a new theory of mind**. That phrase—theory of mind—has been used to describe the way a child learns to understand that other people have different beliefs and goals and intentions. The child learns that people have minds, and that not everything the child knows in his or her mind is known by other people. Christians must also learn new things about their minds. **After all, to become a committed Christian one must learn to override three basic features of human psychology: that minds are private, that persons are visible, and that love is conditional and contingent upon right behavior.** These psychological expectations are fundamental. To override them without going mad, people must develop a way of being in the world that is able to sustain the violations in relation to God—but not other humans. They do it by paying attention to their minds in new ways. They imagine their minds differently, and they give significance to thoughts and feelings in new ways. > > **These practices work. They change people. That is, they change mental experience, and those changes help people to experience God as more real. The practices don’t work for everyone, and they do not work for each person to the same extent, but there are real skills involved here, skills that develop a psychological capacity called *absorption* that perhaps evolved for unrelated reasons, but that helps the Christian to experience that which is not materially present. These skills and practices make what is absent to the senses present in the mind**. > > To say this is not to say that God is an illusion. I am pointing out the obvious: that the supernatural has no natural body to see, hear, or smell. To know God, these Christians school their minds and senses so that they are able to experience the supernatural in ways that give them more confidence that what their sacred books say is really true. > > *Luhrmann, T.M.. When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.*

I'd like to start this question by citing the definition of *intellectual assent* provided by the article [*Is faith intellectual assent?*](https://www.gotquestions.org/intellectual-assent.html) : > **To give intellectual assent is to agree with something on a factual basis**. Faith involves intellectual assent, and intellectual assent is an important part of faith, but faith is much more than knowing facts. Faith does not mean that you suspend your intellect. Someone once defined faith as “believing what you know isn’t true.” Such a suspension of the intellect is not faith! Rather, faith is committing yourself to something that you believe to be true. In other words, intellectual assent represents an epistemic state characterized by agreement with specific factual propositions about reality. But instead of conceptualizing intellectual assent as a binary condition (agreeing versus disagreeing), a more nuanced perspective views it as a value within a spectrum, a percentage, or a continuous scale between 0 and 1. In addition, it is crucial to recognize that Christianity encompasses a collection of multiple propositions, necessitating an even more nuanced approach that acknowledges individuals may allocate varying degrees of intellectual assent to each proposition. For instance, a Latter-day Saint may strongly assent to a distinct set of propositions, differing significantly from the propositions to which a Reformed Calvinist might offer stronger intellectual assent. Or take, for example, propositions like *The Earth is roughly 6000 years old,* which might garner robust intellectual assent from a Young-Earth Creationist but receive less agreement from someone adhering to the mainstream scientific consensus on the age of the Earth. The challenges associated with intellectual assent might perhaps be simplified by narrowing down the set of factual propositions that need to be believed to a fundamental core, akin to C. S. Lewis's [*Mere Christianity*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_Christianity) . However, even within this simplified framework, the extent of intellectual assent to Christianity's core tenets would still exhibit a spectrum, contingent upon the individual's assessment of the available evidence. For instance, the evaluation of historical evidence supporting the resurrection of Jesus, arguably the most pivotal proposition in Christianity, requires careful consideration. A highly recommended resource for this examination is [The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History](https://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Jesus-Apologetics-Polemics-History/dp/0567697568) by Dale Allison. As one of the reviewers aptly expressed: > “This is a book of massive erudition around the resurrection, the real events that may well lie behind it, and how to read its popular New Testament residues and cross-cultural parallels. Allison engages the full power and depth of contemporary biblical criticism to show that the scriptural accounts are relatively thin but nevertheless intriguing documents for the responsible historian and can reasonably be read faithfully or skeptically. The originality, even genius, of the book lies in how he then turns to other independent literatures to “think in parallels,” playing, for example, well-documented Marian apparitions and angelic, bereavement, and near-death contacts off the early New Testament accounts or the Buddhist rainbow body off the empty tomb, always with a double refusal to fall into either easy debunking reduction or naïve literalist belief. **The result is a shocking book that troubles one's certainty, whatever that certainty happens to be, and advances a profound humility before one of the most important mysteries of the history of religions**. It turns out that the questions of “what really happened” or, more basic still, “what a body is” are much more complicated than is normally thought or believed.” ―*Jeffrey J. Kripal, Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought, Rice University, USA* But moving beyond mere intellectual assent, with all its associated epistemological challenges, there is also the concept of the "new birth" or the "born-again experience." Unlike a purely intellectual exercise, this transformative phenomenon is considered supernatural, an event that believers are expected to undergo at some point in their lives. It appears to me that the extent to which one intellectually assents to certain propositions can be addressed intellectually through the practical study of evidence, arguments, and counter-arguments. However, triggering a supernatural experience, such as the "born-again" encounter, is not something for which I can discern an obvious method, if a method even exists at all. Given these considerations, my question for Evangelical Protestants is as follows: How do Evangelical Protestants understand the relationship between intellectual assent to core beliefs and the experience of being "born-again"? Specifically, is there consensus within your faith tradition on whether a high degree of intellectual assent is a prerequisite for undergoing a "born-again" experience, and if so, are there established guidelines regarding the process leading to this experience?

Just to be clear, I'm only referring to activities that are victimless, or at least harm nobody except for those who willingly participate. If I understand Calvinist (TULIP) theology correctly, criminalizing something perceived to be a sin won't save anyone because refraining from that sin isn't enough to avoid hell. On the other hand, for someone who has already been born again, it is impossible to lose their salvation no matter what sin they commit. I don't mean to start a debate; I just want to gain some perspective.

I have some but not much idea about the differences between Mainline and Evangelical. I looked up the two words in dictionary, but I am wondering what relations are between their general non-religious meanings to their religious usages? For example, I can't tell how the meanings in https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mainline relate to its religious usage.