INTRODUCTION

The Evangelical Dictionary of World Religions recognizes that from its inception Christianity has been a world religion. This may surprise many people who identify Christianity with Western Europe and North America. Christianity was birthed in the Middle East, and it quickly traveled the world. Christian communities emerged in Europe, Africa, India, and China within a relatively short time.

This historically global character of Christianity has only been accentuated in our increasingly global world. People and ideas are spreading across the globe in new and unprecedented ways. This means that Christians (and those of all religions) are more likely than ever to interact with people of other faiths in their travels or on their street. So here we include information that will help Christians understand their own faith better in this context and information they will find useful in their encounters with members of other faiths.

This dictionary contains articles that describe Christianity, particularly in its evangelical form. This will help evangelicals understand their own beliefs and how they differ both from other Christian traditions and from other world religions. The other main focus is on the nature and beliefs of other major world religions. In the category of world religions, we have included Buddhism, the Hindu tradition, Islam, and Judaism, as well as a number of smaller groups. Here we followed a fairly common academic practice of classing any religious movement with around ten million members as a world religion. Therefore, in most cases, the groups chosen contain more than ten million members worldwide. They are also groups that have members scattered around the globe. Finally, they are groups with a history—that is, ones that have demonstrated staying power over several generations. At the same time, we also included some information about smaller or more localized groups that people are likely to encounter in their daily lives.

Some people may be surprised that we included the Mormons, or more correctly the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Our reason for classifying them as a “world religion” is threefold. First, there are now well over ten million Mormons worldwide, making them a global religious movement. Second, while the Mormon Church claims to be Christian and many Mormons attempt to live “Christian lives,” the core teachings of this new religion reject the Christian tradition and condemn all Christian groups as apostates. Third, when Mormon doctrines are examined closely (and even many Mormons do not realize this), they sharply differ from traditional Christianity and take the form of an entirely new religion.

We hope that The Evangelical Dictionary of World Religions will provide readers with a rich resource that will enable them to live as Christians in an increasingly complex world that reflects the religious confusion of the first century of the Christian era. In this way, we hope we have prepared Christians to understand the culture we now live in, their non-Christian colleagues and neighbors, and, in a possibly surprising way, the world of the New Testament.

All the contributors are Christians who hold to the core evangelical commitments. They are also scholars in the relevant fields, most in the academy, but others primarily in the field interacting with persons and groups of alternate faiths. So while much unites the contributors, there is certain to be a diversity in many areas, and we have not sought uniformity. Instead, scholarly differences will be seen in many matters, such as preferred dates for historical events and persons, preferred translations or transliterations of foreign-language terms, and the meaning or significance of various concepts.