Where Everybody's Crazy

Here are some categorisations that Christians fall into. Now I'm not saying that categorisations like this are all necessarily bad, because we all think in different ways.

What we don't need to do is fight about them. For instance, many would claim that those who tick any of the boxes on the bottom line aren't Christians at all. :)

I'm sure that some of these are mutually incompatible or mutually redundant. (All fundamentalists are literalists, for instance, and you won't find many literalist cessationists.) And I'm sure there are lots of distinctions I haven't thought of. Now, what do all those words mean?

General categories

The first category is the general politics. Evangelicals will tell you that "evangelical" means that they are committed to sharing the Gospel. This is bogus. That's the literal meaning of the word, but it implies all sorts of attitudes about the Bible, about morality, and the way atonement works, and so on. The fact that they will focus on the literal meaning and not tell you about the subtle shades of meaning tells you what you need to know about these.

Conservative evangelicals are evangelicals but even more so. The standard joke about conservative evangelicals is that their Trinity consists of the Father, the Son and the Holy Scripture. You won't find conservative evangelical charismatics, say.

Fundamentalist evangelicals are like evangelicals but... think American right wing. Yes, those. The only category of "fundamentalists" in the world who proudly self-apply the title; to everyone else, it's an insult.

Ecumenicals want the church to stop fighting and all pull together. To do this, they have to try to keep everyone happy, which means everybody thinks that the ecumenicals are compromisers. They are the OpenBSD of the Christian world. Everyone knows that that's what they ought to be, but at the same time really don't want to do it the way the ecumenicals have, and so don't do it at all.

Liberals tend to take a less firm view of Scripture and personal ethics, but are very strong on God's love and concern for society. Evangelicals really hate liberals. They are the enemy. I haven't worked out why.

Other religions

This column is about how they relate to other religions. Exclusivists claim that Christianity, and in particular, church membership, is the only way to be "saved", and other religions are frankly wrong. To be slightly unfair, exclusivists like sending people to hell. Inclusivists claim that Jesus Christ is the only way to be saved, and either he will save all those of other religions (the universalist position) or we don't know how God will deal with those of other religions. As the diagram suggests, there's a wide variety of shades of thought inside those two categories, including some overlap. Pluralists, and yes, there are Christian pluralists, say that all religions are the same.

Holy Spirit

Pentecostalists and charismatics are, to all intents and purposes, identical, but giving them different names leaves them with one more thing to fight about. I can't tell the difference, but I think pentecostalists say that you must have and display the gifts of the Spirit, and particularly the gift of speaking in tongues, to be saved and function as a Christian, whereas charismatics just think it's a good idea.

Cessationists say that the gifts of the Spirit are simply unavailable, because once the Church compiled the Bible it had everything it needed. You would think that Church historians would have mentioned the time when the Spirit left the Church alone, but never mind. There are not many cessationists, but those that are about do make a big noise.

Bible

Literalists hold the Bible to be literally true. This is one of the tenets of Christian fundamentalism. Historicists say that there are bits of the Bible that are historical, primarily the death and resurrection of Jesus, and bits which are mythological, and smart people can see the difference if they try. Revisionists are a bit more sceptical, and hold things like the Jesus Seminar to vote on what Jesus was actually likely to have said and done. Modernists treat the Bible as true apart from the supernatural bits. I'm sure there are those who are even more sceptical and treat the Bible as completely ahistorical (I'm thinking of Moltmann or Bultmann or one of the -manns) but I don't know what they're called and there are very few of them.

And the rest

Once we've dealt with theology and philosophy, we can finally get into denominations, and there are plenty of those to choose from too.

For myself, I'm one of those wacky postmoderns who wants to tick all the boxes. Especially the one that says "Christian". Which I've deliberately not put on there, since for many people that's the least important one.