The Evangelical Dictionary of World Religions

CASTE. Derived from the Portuguese word casta (meaning “color” or “race”), the English term caste was coined by British colonizers to designate the various social classes they observed in India. Yet the origin and function of the caste system is a matter of extensive debate among scholars of Indian religion and culture. Some such scholars believe that the Indo-Iranian (Aryan) conquerors of northwest India (who invaded ca. 1500 BC) structured their social life in accordance with a hierarchy of three people-groups—the Brahmins (priests), the Ksatriya (warriors), and the Vaisya (artisans and farmers)—and that the non-Aryan peoples of this then-occupied region were deemed a fourth social class, the Shudra. In any event, something akin to the Aryan system of social organization is found in the “Purusha Hymn” of the Rig Veda, wherein these four classes of persons are portrayed as having their divinely ordained genesis in the primeval sacrifice of the Cosmic Man. In light of the presumed authority of this narrative for patterning social order, many devout Hindus were permitted to engage only in those activities that were (allegedly) fitting for members of their particular class. In this scheme of things, each class (varna) was thought to have its own set of social-religious obligations (dharma) that must be fulfilled by its members. The widespread acceptance of the doctrine that people are reborn in accordance with the karma of their social group—and thus are suited to carry out the unique functions of that class—has served to reinforce the caste system. Brahmins are thought to possess the capacity of sacred knowledge and instruction; Ksatriyas, to possess skill in weaponry and governance; Vaisyas, to have aptitute for agriculture and commerce; and Sudras, to be suited for serving the other three classes. A fifth social group, the outcastes (untouchables), emerged later in India’s history and was regarded as existing outside the caste system altogether; its members were consigned to performing ritually polluting tasks like disposing of corpses and were not allowed to live close to people of other castes.

Even though since its establishment in 1950 India’s constitution has made it illegal to discriminate based on caste, many Hindus continue to identify themselves as members of a particular caste. In many cases, this is because they are still informally compelled to abide by the rules of their caste-related birth group (jati), which is confined to a certain geographical region and maintains distinctive traditions. The fact that the concept of caste still strongly influences the attitudes and practices of many Hindus in contemporary India is not difficult to demonstrate. Many traditional and/or rural communities still forbid their members to marry someone of a different caste. The widespread existence of caste-based organizations perpetuates the political ramifications of the caste system. Caste continues to play an important role during elections, when people frequently vote based wholly or in part on considerations of caste. Most people in higher castes are displeased by government measures that have undermined the social advantages they enjoyed previously. Students in educational institutions and workplace environments often still associate with others primarily on the basis of caste. Persisting conflicts between members of different castes continue to engender deep hostility and in some cases have resulted in violence and killings.

See also AUROBINDO, SRI

Bibliography. J. T. Areddy, “Guru Thrills Devotees by Lifting Heavy Objects, Playing 25 Instruments,” Wall Street Journal; Sri Chinmoy, Beyond Within: A Philosophy for the Inner Life; Chinmoy, God Is . . .: Selected Writings of Sri Chinmoy; Chinmoy, The Wisdom of Sri Chinmoy; Sri Chinmoy Centre, life of Sri Chinmoy home page, http://www.srichinmoy.org; Sri Chinmoy Centre, Sri Chinmoy Library website, http://www.sri chinmoylibrary.com.

H. W. House

CHRIST, NATURES AND ATTRIBUTES OF. Mainstream Christianity has progressed in its comprehension of Christ’s natures and attributes not so much through private, theological speculation as through communal rejection of errors that at least appeared to threaten the substance of the Christian faith. It seems advisable, therefore, to present the Christian consensus on these subjects in the form of a chronological survey of the church’s response to christological errors. This article, therefore, consists of an overview of orthodox Christianity’s responses to the following errors: Arianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism, and Monothelitism.

Arianism. Arius (ca. 250–336), a priest of Alexandria, rendered himself notorious in the early fourth century by denying the full deity of Jesus Christ. According to Arius, Christ was not God but a demigod of sorts: the greatest of God’s creatures and yet merely a creature. In defense of Arius, one might note that a multitude of biblical texts, at first glance, appear to support the conclusion that Jesus Christ was not God. One reads in Psalm 121:4, for example, that “he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep,” yet according to Mark 4:38 (par Matt. 8:24), Jesus was, at one point, “sleeping on a cushion.” Again, according to Malachi 3:6 and James 1:17, God never changes, yet one reads in Luke 2:52, “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature.” Scripture describes God as omnipresent (1 Kings 8:27; Ps. 139:7–10; Jer. 23:24), yet Jesus did not arrive in Bethany until Lazarus had been dead for four days (John 11:17). According to James 1:13, “God cannot be tempted by evil,” yet Jesus was “tempted in every way, just as we are” (Heb. 4:15). God, according to 1 Timothy 1:17, is both immortal and invisible, yet Jesus’s enemies both saw him and slew him on the cross.

Considerations such as these, which one could multiply ad nauseam, by no means prove that Scripture unambiguously portrays Jesus as subdivine. Indeed, the mainstream church of the fourth century considered the scriptural evidence in favor of Jesus’s deity so overwhelming that, at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, it decreed that Jesus was homoousios—that is, of the same substance—with the Father and anathematized anyone who thought otherwise. The church reached this conclusion through reflection on biblical texts such as John 1:1, 18; 20:28; Acts 20:28; Romans 9:5; Titus 2:13; Hebrews 1:8; and 2 Peter 1:1, in which Scripture explicitly refers to Jesus as God. Verses that ascribe divine attributes such as omniscience (John 16:30; 21:17; Col. 2:3), omnipresence (Eph. 1:23; Col. 1:17), existence before creation (John 1:1; 17:5; Col. 1:15–17; Heb. 1:10; Rev. 1:8, 17; 2:8), equality with God (John 5:18; Phil. 2:6), and even deity itself (Col. 2:9) likewise powerfully confirm the church’s position. Scriptural texts that attribute divine functions such as creation (John 1:3, 10; Eph. 2:9; Col. 1:16; Heb. 1:2, 10), the conservation of the universe (Col. 1:17; Heb. 1:3), salvation (Matt. 1:21; Acts 5:31; Phil. 3:20; 2 Tim. 1:10; Titus 1:4; 2:13; 2 Pet. 1:11; 2:20; 1 John 4:14; cf. Isa. 43:11), the forgiveness of sins (Matt. 9:2; par Luke 7:48; Acts 5:31; Col. 3:13), and, indeed, all functions of the Father (John 5:19) to Jesus similarly corroborate the church’s confession that Christ was God.

The authors of the New Testament substantiated the church’s position, moreover, by applying to Christ Old Testament passages that in their original contexts unmistakably refer to God; compare, for example, Deuteronomy 6:4 with 1 Corinthians 8:6; Psalm 68:18 with Ephesians 4:8; Isaiah 8:14 with Romans 9:33a; Isaiah 28:16 with Romans 9:33b and 10:11; Isaiah 45:23 with Romans 14:11 and Philippians 2:10; and Joel 2:32 with Romans 10:13. Indeed, the apostle Paul frequently employs the terms God and Christ interchangeably; the gospel of God (Rom. 15:16; 1 Tim. 1:11), for example, is, in Paul’s usage, the gospel of Christ (1 Cor. 9:18; 2 Cor. 4:4). The judgment seat of God (Rom. 14:10), according to Paul, is the judgment seat of Christ (2 Cor. 5:10). The churches of God (1 Cor. 11:16; 1 Thess. 2:14), in Paul’s language, are the churches of Christ (Rom. 16:16); and the Spirit of God (Rom. 8:9a), in Paul’s judgment, is none other than the Spirit of Christ (Rom. 8:9b). The church thus possessed abundant scriptural warrant for its decree at the Council of Nicaea that Jesus was fully God. This scriptural warrant, nonetheless, hardly sufficed to resolve the dilemma engendered by the passages described above, which characterize Jesus as other than God and gave rise to the heresy of Arianism.

Nestorianism. A proposed solution to this dilemma, which the church overwhelmingly rejected as heretical, was Nestorianism, the brainchild of the sometime patriarch of Constantinople Nestorius (ca. 386–ca. 451). This heresy consisted essentially in the view that there were two Christs. The first of these, who has existed from all eternity, according to Nestorius, is the divine Son to whom Scripture attributes deity and all its prerogatives. The second, however, Nestorius depicted as a merely human person, Jesus, who suffered and died on the cross, slept on a pillow, and so on. Scripture frequently speaks of the human Christ as if he were the eternal Son, Nestorius taught, only because the divine Logos dwells in the person of Jesus in an especially intimate way.

The church officially rejected this view at the Council of Ephesus (431) for at least two reasons. First, Nestorianism reduced the difference between Christ and other human beings to one of degree rather than one of kind. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, according to the teaching of Scripture, all dwell within the Christian (John 14:23; Rom. 8:9). If Nestorius was correct, therefore, and Jesus’s dignity and authority flowed simply from the Son’s indwelling in him, then it seems that the Christian could become Jesus’s equal if only he enjoyed a fuller measure of the divine indwelling. Indeed, if Nestorius was correct, it seems that every Christian will become Jesus’s equal in heaven when the divine indwelling in every believer is perfected. In the conceptual world of Nestorianism, consequently, the superiority of Jesus qua human to those for whom he suffered diminishes almost to the vanishing point.

Second, this Nestorian diminution of the difference between sinners and the crucified Christ wreaked havoc on the Christian doctrine of the atonement, for the macabre spectacle of the Son of God agonizing on the cross seems conceivable only if human beings could not otherwise obtain salvation. The Protestant tradition of mainstream Christianity, accordingly, holds that Christ’s sacrifice was, in fact, indispensable to human salvation because the slightest sin against an infinitely benevolent God merits infinite punishment. That is, God, who is infinitely just, cannot, without forsaking his own perfection, leave any sin without its condign punishment; and the condign punishment for even a single human sin is infinite.

The sufferings of a finite, human being, it seems, could never fully compensate for this infinite debt of punishment; this is why, among other reasons, sinners must suffer for their sins eternally. Only a divine person’s sacrifice, rather, would possess a value that is infinite and consequently sufficient to atone for the infinite guilt of sin. Such a divine sacrifice, therefore, at least appears to constitute a prerequisite sine qua non to God’s forgiveness of human beings. God, however, being unchangeable, cannot suffer in and of himself. For a divine sacrifice to occur, consequently, a divine person must unite to himself a human nature in such a way that this human nature’s suffering, although it in no way impinges on the divine nature’s immutability, constitutes, nevertheless, the suffering of the divine person himself.

Inasmuch as Nestorianism posited that a mere human being, and not a person who is truly and fully God, suffered on the cross, it was, therefore, unacceptable. By depriving human beings of a divine sacrifice for their sins, Nestorianism deprived them of their salvation; for this reason as well, mainstream Christianity rejected Nestorianism as heretical at the Council of Ephesus. Regrettably, however, the church failed at the Council of Ephesus to resolve the dilemma engendered by scriptural texts that ascribe to the one Christ both attributes possessed only by the divine nature and attributes that cannot pertain to the divine nature—a dilemma to which Nestorianism constituted a well-meant, but misguided, solution.

Monophysitism. The church issued its first official answer to the question of how Christ could sleep although he was sleepless, change although he was changeless, suffer although he was impassible, and so on at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The church formulated this answer in the process of countering the heresy of Monophysitism (from monos physis, “a lone nature”)—the heresy, that is, according to which the incarnate Christ possessed only one nature, neither quite human nor quite divine, but rather a mongrel of the two. No actual human being ever seems to have adhered to Monophysitism, which is a caricature of the position—frequently designated miaphysitism (from mia physis, i.e., “one nature”)—actually held by the Council of Chalcedon’s opponents.

Nevertheless, the patently absurd phantom heresy of Monophysitism does appear to constitute the error that the church actually intended to condemn at Chalcedon. Over against the notion that Christ’s divine nature and his human nature coalesced into a hybrid of both, the church declared at the Council of Chalcedon:

With one accord, we confess one and the same Son to be our Lord Jesus Christ. The same one . . . is truly God, and the same one is truly man with a rational soul and body. He is of the same substance as the Father in deity, and of the same substance as we are in humanity, like us in all things except sin. He was, indeed, born of the Father before the ages according to the divine nature; but in the last days the same one was born of the virgin Mary, mother of God in human nature, for us and our deliverance. He is one and the same Christ, the only begotten Son, our Lord, acknowledged in two natures without confusion, without change, without division, without separation, the distinction of the natures being nowhere removed on account of the union, but rather the peculiarity of each nature being kept, and uniting in one person and subsistence. He is not divided or separated into two persons, but is one and the same Son, the only begotten God, the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ.

In this confession, the church did not repudiate the Council of Ephesus’s teaching that there is only one Christ. The church at Chalcedon, rather, complemented the teaching of Ephesus by distinguishing between (1) the one divine person, or subject, in Christ, and (2) the two natures, one divine and one human, through which this one divine subject acted.

How precisely two entirely distinct natures could subsist in a single subject, or person, the church at Chalcedon did not explain; nor, perhaps, can one explain this with any precision. At Chalcedon, however, the church elaborated a conceptual framework within which one can do justice both to Scripture’s attribution of divinity and to its attribution of humanity to one and the same Christ without contradicting oneself. One and the same Christ could be both visible and invisible, both mutable and immutable, both passible and impassible, and so on, the Council of Chalcedon taught because Christ possessed two natures, each of which exemplified properties that the other lacked. The one person of Jesus Christ could be both passible and impassible, therefore, because Christ’s human nature was passible and his divine nature was impassible. The one Christ could be both visible and invisible, likewise, because his divine nature was invisible and his human nature was visible.

One ought not regard this doctrine as an innovation. It appears at least in embryonic form, for example, in Philippians 2:6–7. In this passage, Paul speaks of Christ as the one “who, being in the form [i.e., the nature] of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made himself of no reputation, taking the form [i.e., the nature] of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men” (Phil. 2:6–7 NKJV). Certain earlier Christians, moreover, were unquestionably aware of the pith of this doctrine and assured of its truthfulness. Compare, for example, Augustine’s On the Trinity 1.11.22 and Gregory of Nazianzus’s Oration 29.17. The Council of Chalcedon, nevertheless, constitutes a milestone in the history of Christianity in that it offered the first official, ecclesiastical statement of the doctrine that Christ was one person in two natures.

We must still address the concerns of the many persons who rejected the Council of Chalcedon and insisted that Christ possessed mia physis—that is, one nature. As we have already noted, these dissenters from Chalcedon, or miaphysites, did not imagine that Christ’s divine nature and his human nature merged in the incarnation to form a third sort of being. Instead, they conceived of the distinction between Christ’s divinity and his humanity as analogous to that between the human soul and the human body, which, although they are distinct from each other, form only one, individual, human nature. The miaphysites, moreover, did not deny the legitimacy of the distinction between person and nature. They themselves employed this distinction, in fact, when they affirmed the doctrine of the Trinity, according to which God consists in three divine persons who share a single, divine nature.

The miaphysites rejected the Chalcedonian formula, rather, because they considered it crypto-Nestorian. No nature actually exists, they reasoned, without hypostasis, or subsistence, the mode of being whereby an entity exists as a concrete whole distinguished from other beings. If there is no nature without hypostasis, the miaphysites concluded, then a Christ who possessed two natures must also possess two hypostases, and therefore two persons.

This miaphysite argument would be sound, it seems, if every nature required its own distinctive hypostasis to exist. As John of Scythopolis, Leontius of Byzantium (Against the Nestorians and the Eutychians), and Leontius of Jerusalem (Against the Monophysites) (all flourished in the early sixth century), among others, famously observed, however, this is not evidently the case. There is nothing self-contradictory, these theologians contended, about the notion that two entirely distinct natures might share a single hypostasis by virtue of which, their distinction notwithstanding, they constitute only one concrete whole.

For example, an ax’s wooden handle and its iron head unquestionably possess two radically distinct natures. As long as they are separate, moreover, each possesses its own hypostasis by which it constitutes a concrete whole that is distinct from all other entities. When one attaches the ax’s head to its handle, however, one incorporates them both into a single ax—that is, one concretely existing being. In the process of attaching the ax’s handle and its head, one does not compromise the distinctness of the ax’s two natures—iron and wood—in the slightest.

Just as the iron of the ax’s head and the wood of the ax’s handle can exist by virtue of only one hypostasis without compromising the distinction between iron and wood, Chalcedon’s defenders reasoned, so Christ’s human nature and his divine nature could exist by virtue of the one hypostasis of the eternal Logos without forming a single, divine-human nature. Chalcedon’s proponents concluded, therefore, that one can affirm that Christ possessed two natures without tacitly endorsing Nestorianism.

Monothelitism. Tragically, the argument just rehearsed persuaded few miaphysites of the orthodoxy of Chalcedon. When the Byzantine emperor Heraclius (575–641) attempted to bring religious unity to his empire, therefore, he proposed a Christology of compromise, which, he believed, miaphysites would find more acceptable than unvarnished Chalcedonianism. Historians traditionally refer to the mediating position that Heraclius developed as Monothelitism, a term derived from the Greek words monos and thelēma, meaning “lone” and “will,” respectively. The doctrine represented by this term consisted fundamentally in following two claims: (1) that Christ possessed only one will, and (2) that he possessed only one activity, or energeia. The appeal of this doctrine to miaphysites is obvious; it approximated the miaphysite position that Christ, notwithstanding the distinctness of his divinity and his humanity, constituted a single nature.

Nevertheless, the first plank of Monothelitism, that Christ possessed only one will, appears to face at least two insuperable difficulties. First, one cannot deny the presence in Christ’s human nature of a human will that existed alongside the divine will that the Logos possessed from all eternity, without portraying Christ as incapable of fulfilling the moral law and suffering its penalty on human beings’ behalf; possession of a specifically human will appears to constitute an essential property of human nature, and the moral law demanded the obedience and suffering of a human being—that is, one who possessed all the essential properties of human nature. Second, one cannot deny the presence of a distinctively human will in Christ without portraying his human nature as profoundly dissimilar to that of other human beings and thus running afoul of Hebrews 2:17 (NKJV): “In all things he had to be made like His brethren, that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest.” Either of these considerations, it seems, suffices to render Monothelitism’s ascription of only one will to Christ untenable.

The other plank of Monothelitism, that Christ possessed no distinctively human activity, appears liable to precisely the same objections, for one cannot deny a distinctively human activity to Christ’s human nature without rendering it a lifeless, subhuman instrument. Such an entity, it seems, would neither conform to the requirements of Hebrews 2:17 nor suffice to render the Logos capable of obeying those divine laws that apply specifically to human beings. Both the requirements of the orthodox doctrine of the atonement and the explicit statements of Scripture, therefore, seem to demand that one posit distinctively human activity in Christ alongside his strictly divine acts.

The orthodox believer, consequently, cannot reasonably endorse Monothelitism. The notion that a being can have two wills without having two subjects of those wills—that is, two persons—might, admittedly, appear counterintuitive. In order to prove the combination of two wills in a single person conceivable, however, it seems that one need merely distinguish between ontological subjects and psychological subjectivities. An ontological subject is a subject to which one attributes acts. A psychological subjectivity is, essentially, a mind. In order for an entity to possess two wills, it seems, it requires two psychological subjectivities but not two ontological subjects.

In order to confirm empirically the possibility that a single ontological subject might possess two psychological subjectivities, one need merely consider the case of split-brain patients. A split-brain patient is a person whose corpus callosum, the tissue that connects the right and the left hemispheres of the human brain, has been severed by a physician. As late as the 1960s, physicians actually performed this procedure on patients with severe epilepsy for the purpose of preventing epileptic seizures from spreading from one hemisphere of the brain to the other. Such persons, as the Nobel laureate Roger Sperry verified in a famous series of experiments on split-brain patients, have, in effect, two psychological subjectivities that can learn, will, and so on quite independently of each other. Evidently, a split-brain patient constitutes a concretely existing whole of a rational nature—that is, a single person in the theological sense of the term.

In order to establish the coherence of the doctrine that Christ possessed two fundamentally different activities, it seems, one need merely clarify what those who affirmed this doctrine meant to claim. Proponents of the “two energeiai” doctrine intended by this doctrine merely to assert that the one Christ performed two fundamentally different kinds of activity through two radically different instruments: his divine nature and his human nature. Just as a single pencil can both write through its graphite component and erase through its rubber head, the partisans of two energeiai claimed, one and the same subject, Christ, could and did perform distinctively human actions through his humanity and distinctively divine actions through his divinity.

The doctrine that Christ possessed two wills and two activities, therefore, the only reasonable alternative to Monothelitism, appears at least prima facie plausible. Given the compelling objections to Monothelitism outlined above, the mainstream church seems thoroughly justified, consequently, in its decisions at the Third Council of Constantinople (680–81): to condemn Monothelitism and to acknowledge the existence of two wills and two activities in Christ.

Conclusion. Through its struggles with the heresies of Arianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism, and Monothelitism, then, the church reached the following consensus about the natures and attributes of Christ. Christ was one person, fully God and fully human, who existed in two unconfused natures, a divine and a human. Christ’s human nature did not possess a distinctively human hypostasis but rather subsisted through the hypostasis of the eternal Word. However, notwithstanding its lack of a distinctively human hypostasis, Christ’s human nature possessed both a distinctively human will and a distinctively human activity, which existed harmoniously alongside his divine nature’s eternal activity and will.

Bibliography. Athanasius, Orations against the Arians; Cyril of Alexandria, Letters to Nestorius; M. J. Erickson, The Word Became Flesh: A Contemporary Incarnational Christology; G. D. Fee, Pauline Christology: An Exegetical-Theological Study; A. Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition; R. P. C. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God: The Arian Controversy, 318–381; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, part III, questions 1–26; J. Meyendorff, Christ in Eastern Christian Thought.

D. W. Jowers

CHRISTIAN. A Christian is one whose identity and purpose are defined by being a believer in and follower of Jesus Christ. Since many members of groups who hold heretical doctrines claim to believe in “Jesus Christ” and to be “Christians,” it is paramount to remember that apostolic Christianity was greatly concerned that people believe in the genuine Jesus rather than a counterfeit (2 Cor. 11:1–4). The apostle John stipulates that true and saving belief affirms that “Jesus is the Christ” (the divine Messiah), that he “has come in the flesh,” which refers to his true humanity (1 John 2:22; 4:1–3), and that Jesus is the incarnate Word who is himself God (John 1:1–3, 14, 18; 20:28; see also Col. 2:9). Moreover, belief in Christ requires a monotheistic worldview, which Jesus himself affirmed (Mark 12:29). These christological stipulations rule out any religious groups that deny the true deity of Christ (e.g., nontrinitarian Jehovah’s Witnesses) or teach that Jesus is one god among many (polytheistic Mormons) or claim that Jesus tapped into a universal “Christ Consciousness” available to anyone sufficiently enlightened (New Age adherents), and so on. Christological errors are many (2 Cor. 11:3–4), as the path of destruction is wide (Matt. 7:13–14).

A Christian has repented of his or her sinful ways (Acts 17:30) and has embraced the finished work of Christ’s earthly life, death, and resurrection for the forgiveness of sin, justification before God, and the gracious gift of eternal life (John 3:16; Eph. 2:1–10). A Christian’s saving faith is proven true by an ongoing confession of the gospel and by Spirit-led works that display the sincerity and genuineness of that faith (James 2:14–26). The works themselves, however, do not contribute to one’s status as justified before God through the work of Christ alone by God’s grace alone (Eph. 2:8).

A Christian belongs to Christ (Mark 9:41; 1 Cor. 15:23) and confesses Jesus as Lord (Rom. 10:9). The term Christian was first used at Antioch to describe disciples taught by Barnabas and Saul (Acts 11:26). The term is used two other times in the New Testament: by Agrippa, when he accuses Paul of wanting to make him a Christian (Acts 26:28), and by Peter, who challenges believers not to be ashamed when they “suffer as a Christian” because they “bear that name” (1 Pet. 4:16). The term is taken from christos, which is Greek for the Hebrew messiah, the promised deliverer and anointed one. The term Christ is a title and office that exclusively refers to Jesus of Nazareth. Christian refers to countless people worldwide throughout the centuries who have entrusted their lives to Christ because other Christians have been faithful in making Christ known (Matt. 28:18–20; Acts 1:8). The book of Revelation declares that the redeemed will include “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language” (Rev. 7:9).

Although Christian has become the term most commonly used for followers of Christ, the New Testament employs a wealth of other descriptions, only a few of which we can address. The book of Acts reveals that Christians are often called “disciples” of Christ (Acts 14:21), as were the first disciples in the Gospels. This involves more than being a student or a religious consumer because Jesus stipulates, “Whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:27). Acts also refers to Christians as “followers of the Way” (9:2; 19:9, 23; 22:4; 24:14, 22), meaning the way of Jesus himself (John 14:6), the way of life instead of death (Matt. 7:13–14), the way of heaven instead of hell (Matt. 25:46: John 11:25–26).

Christians of both genders, at times, are referred to as “brothers” in Christ. This expresses the bond of divine love that all believers share (Rom. 12:10; 1 Pet. 3:8) through their friendship with Christ himself (Matt. 28:10; John 20:17; Rom. 8:29; Heb. 2:11–12). Every Christian is a part of the body of Christ (1 Cor. 12:27). In the New Testament church, this brotherhood revolutionized the relationship between a Christian master and his slave. Paul tells Philemon to receive Onesimus “no longer as a slave, but . . . as a dear brother” (Philem. 16).

Because the gospel claims that a person becomes a Christian through saving faith in Christ, those who have partaken of God’s redeeming grace are sometimes simply called “believers,” as opposed to “unbelievers” (2 Cor. 6:15; 1 Tim. 4:10, 12). The New Testament repeatedly warns of those who profess Christian faith but whose lives and/or beliefs belie their profession (Matt. 7:15–23; Gal. 1:6–9; 1 John 2:19).

All Christians are also called “saints” because they are made holy or set apart by God (Eph. 1:1) and because they become more holy (or sanctified) over time through the work of the Holy Spirit (Eph. 5:3). Their sainthood is completed when they are glorified in the presence of Christ after their earthly deaths (1 John 3:2). At the glorious second coming of Christ for his bride, Christians will be given resurrected and imperishable bodies (Phil. 3:20–21) and will dwell with God in a restored cosmos forever (Rev. 21–22).

Bibliography. R. C. Sproul, Faith Alone: The Evangelical Doctrine of Justification; J. Stott, Basic Christianity.

D. R. Groothuis

CHRISTIAN, USE AND MISUSE OF THE TERM. The word Christian was first used as a description of believers in Christ in Antioch, about ten years or so after Jesus’s resurrection (Acts 11:26). The Greek word Christianos means “slave or follower of Christ.” First Peter 4:16 suggests that the word was originally a term of abuse, though one Jesus’s followers were glad to bear (see also Acts 26:28–29). No formal definition or exposition of the term is given in the New Testament.

It did not take long for religious groups to arise that professed to be Christian but that departed from the teachings of Christ and the apostles in radical ways. The New Testament writers themselves took note of this problem, and much of their writings sought to correct and refute the teachings of false prophets or false teachers. Paul warned the Galatian believers that if they sought to be right with God by their observance of the Mosaic law, then Christ would be of no benefit to them and they would find themselves severed from Christ (Gal. 5:2–4). Peter warned that many would follow false teachers who taught “destructive heresies” (2 Pet. 2:1–2). John described as “antichrists” those people who professed to follow Christ but who denied the truth about the Father and the Son, creating rival religious groups (1 John 2:18–23). Thus the idea that some groups of professing Christians were not authentic followers of Christ was clearly articulated in various ways in the New Testament.

In the mid-second century, Justin Martyr warned that “some who are called Christians, but are godless, impious heretics, teach doctrines that are in every way blasphemous, atheistical, and foolish.” Regarding the resurrection of the dead, Justin asserted, “If you have fallen in with some who are called Christians, but who do not admit this [truth] . . . do not imagine that they are Christians” (Dialogue with Trypho 80). Justin, then, denied the designation Christian to groups denying a basic belief of the Christian faith as taught by the apostles.

While the principle of restricting the name Christian to groups and individuals who are faithful to the essential truths of the Christian faith is a time-honored one, uninspired Christian teachers are not infallible in their application of this principle in practice. Justin is himself a good example since in the same passage quoted above, he goes on to assert that he and others “who are right-minded Christians on all points” affirm not only the resurrection of the dead (which he had ample grounds for regarding as an essential; cf. 1 Cor. 15) but also a literal millennium during which Jerusalem would become a magnificent city. Even many “right-minded Christians” who hold to this view today doubt it is one of the essential truths of the faith. Such questions are answered far more reliably (though still not infallibly) through a process of corporate reflection and discussion within the church. In the early church, this process resulted in several creeds—notably the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Definition of Chalcedon—that have stood the test of time and are recognized worldwide as reliable expressions of essential Christian doctrine.

In general we may distinguish two senses or uses of the terms Christian and Christianity. In the broad sense, any individual or group that identifies Jesus Christ as its primary religious figure is “Christian” and is part of the world religion known as Christianity. In this sense, really any group that identifies itself as Christian is defined as such for the purposes of religious classification. Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, the Unification Church, and a host of other religious groups can all be called Christian in this sense. No spiritual, moral, or doctrinal evaluation or approval attaches to the term as used in this religious-classification sense.

In a narrower sense, an individual or group is said to be “Christian” if its doctrine and behavior are considered adequately representative of what Christ’s followers should believe and do. Inevitably different groups will disagree as to who are Christians in this more profound, evaluative sense. Even here it is best not to use the term as if it were a definitive judgment about who genuinely follows Christ and who does not (a judgment beyond our competency). Rather, the term in this narrower sense describes those individuals and groups whose outward profession (orthodoxy) and behavior (orthopraxy) are such that they appear to be upholding the essential standards of Christian faith and practice.

From an evangelical perspective, there are many individuals in most professing Christian denominations and independent churches who are Christians in this narrower sense. True Christianity is defined not institutionally but relationally, as adherence to “the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people” (Jude 3) out of fidelity to Christ. Christians in this narrow sense accept in substance the doctrines of the early creeds and accept one another across institutional lines. Church bodies that uphold those creedal doctrines as well as minimal, traditional standards of right conduct (cf. 1 Cor. 5:9–13) are to be regarded as Christian churches. (This includes nonevangelical church bodies, though evangelicals generally view such denominations as in varying degrees theologically weak or corrupt.) Religious bodies that profess to be Christian but do not uphold these minimal doctrinal and practical standards cannot be accepted as authentically Christian.

One such group that expresses strong objections to evangelicals denying that it should be regarded as Christian is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In recent years, the LDS Church has mounted a campaign to change the perception that it is not Christian in the evangelical sense. The LDS Church does not (usually) deny that evangelicals or other orthodox believers are Christians; it simply wishes to be accepted as also being a legitimate Christian body. Its concerns in the main can be answered simply by agreeing that the LDS Church is “Christian” in the broad, world-religions classification sense, but explaining that from an orthodox perspective it is not “Christian” in the narrower theological sense.

Bibliography. C. L. Blomberg, “Is Mormonism Christian?,” in The New Mormon Challenge, ed. F. Beckwith, C. Mosser, and P. Owen; J. Gresham Machen, What Is Christianity?

R. M. Bowman Jr.

CHRISTIANITY, PROTESTANT. Origin and Meaning of the Term. Historically, the word Protestant is derived from the “protest” lodged by the German Lutheran rulers at the Diet of Speyer in 1529. Three years earlier, that same body agreed unanimously to allow each territorial ruler to regulate the religious affairs within his land, pending the convening of a general council by the pope to effect a final solution to the religious disputes agitating the empire. Contrary to this earlier decree, the council of 1529 rescinded this liberty by a majority vote, requiring the rulers of whatever territory to enforce the Edict of Worms against the Lutherans and to uphold the rights of the papal churches, including, where necessary, the restoration of property and of the Roman mass. In response to this, the princes of five territories and fourteen south German cities issued their protest, arguing that the earlier unanimous decision of the diet could not justly be overthrown by a mere majority, especially in such a matter of conscience.

It should be observed that the Latin verb protestari, used at Speyer, was not fundamentally an oppositional term but carried the sense of a public testimony or confession. While the minority party at Speyer certainly was registering its objections to the majority decision, its “protestation” was at least as much a positive declaration of its commitment to maintain the pure gospel as it was a negative protest. These observations apply equally to the English word protest derived from it, which only in later usage came to have an exclusively negative sense. Consequently, the word’s modern connotations should not be injected into an earlier time, nor should we see in it, as some do, an expression of hostility to Rome.

It is also true that protestari was employed in formal juridical and political proceedings such as at Speyer. The word does not have a fundamentally religious provenance or coloring but was suited to the political context in which it first arose.

Defining Protestantism. Some have defined Protestantism exclusively or at least largely in terms of opposition to Roman Catholicism. This tendency is seen especially (though not exclusively) in Roman Catholic authors; for example, Rahner and Vorgrimler say, “What chiefly unites them is that they all protest against the Catholic Church” (420). However, such definitions focus inordinately on what Protestantism is not rather than on what it affirms. Furthermore, definitions of this class are too porous to be useful. They do not—sometimes by design—distinguish the magisterial reform of Luther and Calvin from the radical reformers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including those who denied orthodox credenda such as the doctrine of the Trinity and the two natures in Christ. Those who classify as Protestant modern heterodox groups, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Christian Scientists, and Unitarian Universalists, perpetuate this lack of distinction. Nor is it adequate to classify such groups as “marginal Protestants,” as some have suggested; those in the mainstream have never identified these groups as Protestant, marginal or otherwise. From the opposite angle, the radical wing of the sixteenth-century Reformation generally did not see itself as organically related to the magisterial reform, and in the case of the modern heterodox groups, its disavowal of Protestant status is more emphatic, if anything. (Indeed, the Unitarian Universalists, who are sometimes classified as Protestant, do not even allow themselves to be characterized as a “Christian” body, much less as a Protestant one.) Consequently, it is difficult to see the propriety of applying to such groups a title that the mainstream Protestant bodies disallow and that the groups themselves eschew.

Minimally, in order for a body to be considered Protestant there must be some connection to the magisterial Reformation of the sixteenth century—if not historically then at least ideologically. The historical lineage of many modern denominations—such as Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodists—is clear enough. Presumably, though, one could start a body de novo that might adopt, for example, the confessions of a historic Protestant denomination and might therefore reasonably be classified as a “Protestant” church.

This, of course, leads to the consideration of what theological elements are required in order for an individual or group to be considered generically “Protestant.”

Theological Characteristics of Protestantism. Protestantism has significant continuities with the historic church. The early Protestants saw themselves as “catholic” in acknowledging the historic, core credenda of orthodox Christian faith, such as the doctrine of the Trinity, the two natures in Christ, and the bodily resurrection. On the other hand, they also believed that the institutional church needed reformation in certain key areas, particularly concerning the issues of religious authority and the appropriation of salvation for the believer. The Protestant position has been expressed in terms of the “solas” of the Reformation—that is, sola Scriptura (the Bible alone as the infallible source of religious authority, and not the church’s tradition as interpreted by the magisterium), sola gratia (salvation is solely by God’s grace, apart from human merit), and sola fide (salvation is appropriated through faith alone, again apart from human works). To these might also be added solo Christo (or solus Christus)—that is, that we are saved by Christ alone, apart from the intercession and merits of human mediators, such as Mary and the saints.

The aforementioned doctrines were the common possession of Protestantism generically. At the same time, the discontinuities between the different Protestant factions ought not to be ignored. In its historical development, the issue of greatest moment that restrained the fledging Protestant movement from uniting against a common Roman Catholic opponent was the question of the Eucharist, specifically the nature of Christ’s presence in it. Zwingli and his followers took a symbolic view, while Luther’s position was closer to (though not identical with) the Roman Catholic view, asserting that Christ’s literal body and literal blood were truly present in, with, and under the elements of bread and wine. Calvin’s doctrine was seen by some as a mediating position, arguing that Christ is really present in the Lord’s Supper but in a spiritual way only. Numerous other theological differences of varying degrees of magnitude and importance between the different Protestant groups could be cited as well. Nevertheless, despite these and other variations, at least in the broadest sense a common view of religious authority and a similar soteriology provide a helpful starting point for distilling a common Protestant identity.

“Old” versus “New” Protestantism. A distinction is commonly made between “old” and “new” Protestantism. The new Protestantism arises from the tectonic shift in intellectual thought patterns emerging during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In its attempt to maintain the relevance of the Christian faith to a culture that had emphasized the greatness of human reason and accomplishment, the rationalizing tendencies of the new Protestantism appeared in several areas, most notably in the nineteenth-century rise of liberal biblical criticism and in an acceptance of Darwinian evolution. Liberal Protestants also tended to deny other doctrines of classic orthodoxy as no longer tenable to modern sensibilities, such as the deity of Christ, his miracles and virgin birth, and the bodily resurrection. The movement away from historic orthodoxy in liberal Protestantism was so great that, as Meinhold states, the “ancient Protestant traits [of liberal Protestantism had] little vitality or appear simply as rudiments owing their survival to a lack of resolution” (113–14). Others, however, regard the movement toward liberalism as the natural outgrowth of the germinal principles latent in Protestantism’s essence from the start, specifically those of individualism, autonomy, and freedom of thought.

It seems most plausible to regard the development of a liberal theology within Protestantism as a deviation from its core principles rather than as their natural development. Indeed, as has been argued persuasively, the Enlightenment was more properly the child of Renaissance humanism, focusing, as it did, on human potential. But the reform movement of the sixteenth century stood in opposition to this humanism in many crucial respects, notably in its more robust, biblical doctrine of human moral inability and dependence on divine grace.

In light of Meinhold’s observation, one might be tempted to ask whether the expression liberal Protestant is a contradiction in terms. Regardless, the term is well established and usefully classifies the liberal wing within the historic denominations deriving from the Reformation. It is significant that even those denominations viewed as “liberal” in their orientation have not abrogated their official doctrinal standards, even if strict and literal subscription by individual ministers and members is no longer required as in the past. It is also true that a conservative remnant is found within these denominations, which urges their respective bodies to return to those confessions and standards already in place rather than to formulate fundamentally new ones.

Note also that the liberal and conservative wings of a given Protestant denomination typically have more in common with their ideological counterparts in other Protestant denominations than they do with the opposing faction found in their own denominational home. Much of the ecumenical, transdenominational cooperation among Protestants is predicated on this fact.

Major Protestant Denominations, Statistics, and Current Trends. Among the most common groups receiving the classification of “Protestant” are the various species of Lutherans, Baptists, Reformed (including Presbyterians), Congregationalists, Methodists, and mainstream Pentecostals. Anglicans/Episcopalians are sometimes classed as Protestants, though many Anglicans prefer to think of themselves as (non-Roman) “catholic.”

Estimates vary as to the number of Protestants worldwide. In 2015 the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary estimated the global total for the number of Protestants (including Anglicans) at more than 543 million. Adding independent groups brings the total number to over 950 million.

As for current trends, Roof observes, “The geographic center for Protestantism, once located in northwestern Europe prior to its shift to North America, is now shifting to Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Pacific Rim. Here, amidst largely nonwhite indigenous populations, evangelical Protestant zeal and growth currently is at its greatest” (623). At the same time, the vitality of mainstream Protestantism in the West may be waning. Wright believes that “without a firm doctrinal backbone, Protestantism [in the West] faces continuing dissipation,” with conversion to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy as “newly appealing” (964). Nevertheless, as Protestant churches continue to experience significant growth in other parts of the world, “whatever happens in the Old World, Protestantism promises to continue to be of major significance” (Gunton, 573).

See also CONFUCIANISM

Bibliography. S. A. Queen, From Chronicle to Canon: The Hermeneutics of the Spring and Autumn Annals according to Tung Chung-shu; J. D. Sellmann, Timing and Rulership in Master Lu’s Spring and Autumn Annals (Lushi Chunqiu); X. Yao, An Introduction to Confucianism.

H. W. House

CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) is the religion whose members are known as Mormons.

History. Origins: Joseph Smith (1827–44). In 1827 Joseph Smith claimed that an angel had directed him to a hill near his family’s farm in Manchester, New York, where he dug up some gold plates on which was written a history of the Nephites and Lamanites, Israelite ancestors of the American Indians. After some setbacks, in 1829 Smith dictated what he claimed was an inspired translation of a portion of the gold plates titled the Book of Mormon. Near the time the translation was complete, Smith’s chief scribe, Oliver Cowdery, his friend David Whitmer, and his chief financial backer, Martin Harris, attested that they saw both the gold plates and the angel. Shortly thereafter eight men from the Smith and Whitmer families signed an affidavit claiming they also had seen the plates. The first printing of the Book of Mormon was released on March 26, 1830, and on April 6 Smith formally organized the Church of Christ. He immediately began revising the King James Version of the Bible; the first part of his “inspired translation,” a revision of the early chapters of Genesis, was later published as the Book of Moses.

A key element of the new church’s agenda was evangelizing the Indians, or “Lamanites,” a mandate articulated in the Book of Mormon. Smith commissioned a group of men led by Cowdery to travel west on a mission to the Lamanites. Along the way, the men made numerous converts in Kirtland, Ohio, so that by the end of 1830 there were about three hundred members in the area, almost triple the number in upstate New York. In December, Smith issued a revelation calling for the church to relocate to Ohio. Meanwhile, missionaries continued to Missouri, the state farthest west at the time. Many of Smith’s revelations in 1831 concerned establishing a center and a temple in Independence, Missouri. As Mormons began to settle there, tensions with the non-Mormon population soon turned violent. In July 1833, a mob attacked Mormons in the town and destroyed their publishing company. By November, the Missouri Mormons had been forced to relocate north to Clay County. In the spring of 1834, shortly after changing the name of the religion to the Church of the Latter-day Saints, Smith led a contingent of Mormons to Missouri and set up an organization with David Whitmer as its president. Thus for several years the movement had two major centers with separate leadership structures. Many Missourians continued to be hostile toward Mormons for various reasons, including their growing numbers, their religious claims, and their favorable disposition toward abolitionism. In late 1836, the Missouri Mormons relocated again still farther north and built a city they called Far West.

Recognizing that it might be a long time before the Independence temple was built, in 1833 Smith had begun work on a temple in Kirtland. At great cost to the Ohio Mormons, the temple was built and dedicated in 1836. The Mormons’ financial troubles were compounded in 1837 when they created a quasi-banking institution, the Kirtland Safety Society, only to have it fail in the wake of a nationwide economic panic. Martin Harris and more than two dozen other Mormons who faulted Smith were excommunicated by the end of the year, and many more Mormons simply abandoned the movement. In March 1838, Smith, facing arrest for bank fraud, moved with a few other Mormons to Far West; most of the nearly two thousand Ohio Mormons followed them over the next four months. Conflict with the leaders Smith had installed in Missouri led to more excommunications, notably those of Cowdery and Whitmer in April. Smith also issued a revelation at the time changing the religion’s name again to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (the hyphenated form “Latter-day” was adopted much later).

The arrival of Smith and the influx of more Mormons into Missouri intensified conflict there. Mormon leader Sidney Rigdon gave a speech on July 4 warning non-Mormons of a “war of extermination” in which one side or the other would be destroyed if mobs disturbed the Mormons again. Predictably, the disturbance came, and a three-month war ensued. On October 27, 1838, Governor Lilburn Boggs issued an executive order calling for the Mormons to “be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary.” Four days later, Smith and other Mormons were arrested and eventually imprisoned for about six months in Liberty Jail in Clay County.

In April 1839, Smith escaped and traveled to Quincy, Illinois, where most of the Missouri Mormons had fled. They quickly began buying up property in Commerce, Illinois, which they renamed Nauvoo (beautiful). The Mormons obtained a strong city charter for Nauvoo that gave them a relatively free hand there, and Smith was emboldened to initiate radical changes. In 1841, construction began on a temple in Nauvoo, which was to have functions very different from what had been envisioned earlier in Kirtland. In 1840, Smith had already introduced the concept of baptism for the dead, which was to become one of the two main functions of the new temple. The other main function was a new “endowment” ceremony that was first conducted in the Nauvoo temple in May 1842. The endowment drew many of its ritual elements from the Freemasons, which Smith had joined two months earlier.

In April 1841, Smith began secretly practicing plural marriage, “sealing” to himself through November 1843 at least thirty wives in addition to his legal wife, Emma. About ten of these were married at the time of sealing, including two sisters and a mother and daughter. The wives also included three other pairs of sisters and (although Smith was thirty-seven at the time) two girls about fourteen years of age. Smith did not issue a written revelation about plural marriage until July 1843, and even then it was shared covertly with select individuals.

During this same period, Smith also radically reformulated Mormon doctrine. In March 1842, he published the Book of Abraham, a book he claimed was an inspired translation of one of the ancient Egyptian papyri that the Mormons had purchased from a traveling salesman in 1835. It revealed an elaborate cosmology in which the spirits of human beings preexisted in heaven and contained an alternate version of the creation account of Genesis 1–2 with a plurality of Gods who organized, rather than created, the world. At the same time, Smith published an account he had written in 1838 of the origins of the LDS movement. In this account, Smith claimed that the Father and the Son had appeared to him as separate personages. Decades after Smith’s death, this “First Vision” came to be viewed as the foundational event of the Restoration. In April 1843, Smith went even further, teaching that God the Father has a body of flesh and bones. In April 1844, Smith’s “King Follett Discourse” taught that God was once a mortal man who progressed to becoming a God and that human beings should do the same.

Meanwhile, earlier in 1844 Smith announced his candidacy for US president. Many Mormons were provoked to open dissent by these developments. A group led by William Law obtained indictments against Joseph Smith in nearby Carthage, and on June 7 the group published an exposé about him titled the Nauvoo Expositor. Three days later, the Nauvoo city council had the press destroyed. Responding to the threat of arrest, Smith declared martial law, but on June 25, facing a potentially disastrous response from the state militia, Smith and his brother Hyrum surrendered and were jailed in the neighboring town of Carthage, where they were charged by the state with treason. Two days later, a mob of about two hundred men stormed the jail. Hyrum and Joseph Smith were both shot and killed. Despite Joseph Smith’s use of a pepper-box pistol in self-defense, Mormons regard him as a martyr, sealing his testimony with his own blood.

Establishment: Brigham Young (1844–77). The Mormon movement, already strained by dissensions during Joseph Smith’s lifetime, splintered following his death. The two most notable splinter sects were the Strangites, who accepted James J. Strang’s claim of succession, and a group that eventually became known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which accepted Smith’s son Joseph Smith III as the true successor. Most Mormons, however, accepted Brigham Young as the new leader. In 1846 Young led a large contingent of Mormons on a westward trek. The following year they reached the Salt Lake Valley, where they decided to settle. At the end of the year, Young was formally ordained as the president of the LDS Church. In 1850 the US designated Utah as a territory and appointed Young as its governor. As both religious and political head in Utah, Young asserted his authority freely. In 1852 he formally announced the exclusion of blacks from the LDS priesthood, based on statements in the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham indicating that black skin was a curse from God. That same year, Young gave a notorious sermon stating that Adam was God, and in another address he openly acknowledged that Mormons in Utah practiced polygamy. Young himself eventually had fifty-five wives and fathered fifty-four children by sixteen of them. By 1857 tensions between the territory and the federal government were so high that the US Army was sent to Utah. During the short-lived Utah War, on September 11, 1857, at Mountain Meadows, Mormons massacred 120 Arkansans who were traveling through Utah on their way to California. Although a peace treaty was signed in 1858, the issue of polygamy remained unresolved for almost fifty years. When Young died in 1877, the LDS Church had grown to about one hundred thousand members.

Transition: Settling the Polygamy Issue (1877–1907). During the tenure of Young’s successor, John Taylor, the US Congress enacted the Edmunds-Tucker Act in 1887, which disincorporated the LDS Church and called for the confiscation of its properties. Taylor passed away later that year and was succeeded by Wilford Woodruff, who spent the next three years in hiding while the church challenged Edmunds-Tucker. When the Supreme Court upheld the act, Woodruff faced an imminent threat of the government confiscating church properties and imprisoning him and other leaders. A “manifesto” disavowing polygamy, published in the LDS scriptures as Official Declaration 1, was drawn up and accepted in 1890. The government ceased proceedings against the LDS Church and permitted Utah to become a state in 1896—with a provision in the state constitution forever prohibiting polygamy. Despite these events, new polygamous unions were privately sanctioned by the church in the US and more openly in other countries. Such was the case during Lorenzo Snow’s brief time as church president (1898–1901), and the practice continued into the presidency of Joseph F. Smith (son of Hyrum). When Mormon apostle Reed Smoot was elected to the US Senate in 1902, hearings were held from 1904 to 1907 in which Smoot’s right to the office was challenged. The Reed Smoot hearings forced President Smith to issue a second “manifesto” in 1904, more explicitly repudiating polygamy and mandating excommunication for anyone entering into new polygamous unions. When Smoot prevailed and retained his seat, the polygamy issue was considered settled, although various so-called Fundamentalist Mormon sects arose later that practiced polygamy and viewed the LDS Church as having apostatized from the teachings of the first Joseph Smith by its repudiation of the practice.

Stabilization: The New Synthesis (1908–45). With the polygamy issue behind it, the LDS Church turned its attention to developing a coherent, stable belief system. During the last years of Joseph F. Smith’s presidency, the church leadership issued two important statements. The first, The Origin of Man (1909), on the basis of Joseph Smith’s revelations, denied that human beings evolved from lower animals and asserted that humans were “born of heavenly parents,” that God himself was “an exalted man,” and that each person is capable “of evolving into a God.” The second, The Father and the Son: A Doctrinal Exposition (1916), sought to harmonize the teachings of the Mormon scriptures and to some extent later teaching. The Book of Mormon had taught an overly simplistic form of the Trinity that often sounded modalist—with verses asserting that Jesus was the Father and the Son. Joseph Smith had moved away from that idea fairly quickly, so that the 1835 Lectures on Faith, which were included in the LDS scripture Doctrine and Covenants, explained that the Father and the Son were two separate personages and the Holy Spirit was the Mind they shared. At the end of his life, Joseph Smith taught that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost were three Gods. The 1916 statement harmonized these disparate doctrines by explaining that the divine title Father had four different meanings. Elohim is God the Father, the literal parent of all our spirits. Jesus Christ is Jehovah, the Son of Elohim, and can be called Father because he is the coorganizer of the world, the Savior, and the representative of God the Father. Literally, though, Jesus is not our Father but rather our elder spirit Brother. (Brigham Young’s teaching about Adam as God was simply ignored.) As problematic as many of these distinctions are, they have functioned successfully for a century as an interpretive grid through which Mormons read the Bible and the LDS scriptures. The greatest difficulty remaining was Lectures on Faith, which explicitly taught that the Father was a personage of Spirit rather than having a body of flesh and bones as Joseph Smith had later taught. After Joseph F. Smith died in 1918 and was succeeded by Heber J. Grant, the church issued a new edition of the Mormon scriptures with Lectures on Faith removed (1921). By the end of Grant’s tenure in 1945, the LDS Church had grown to nearly a million members worldwide.

Legitimation: Cultural and Apologetic Challenges (1945–Present). The postwar LDS Church was first led by George Albert Smith. As the first LDS Church president not to practice plural marriage, Smith represented the beginning of the cultural mainstreaming of Mormonism. Also in 1945 historian Fawn M. Brodie published No Man Knows My History, a biography of Joseph Smith that inaugurated serious historical scholarship into the origins of Mormonism. The challenges that such scholarship posed would intensify over the next several decades. George Albert Smith was succeeded in 1951 by David O. McKay. That same year, Hugh Nibley began publishing a series of articles titled The World of the Jaredites, typifying Nibley’s career-long project of developing sophisticated defenses of the antiquity of the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham. The 1960s, however, produced several shock waves to traditional views of Mormon origins. In 1961 two former Mormons, Jerald and Sandra Tanner, published a reproduction of the Book of Commandments, the precursor to the Doctrine and Covenants, which showed that Joseph Smith had altered many of his earlier revelations to buttress his authority. The Tanners’ Mormonism—Shadow or Reality? (1963), later published as The Changing World of Mormonism, was a massive work of documentary reproductions and commentary exposing problems in traditional views of Mormon origins and doctrine. In 1965, Paul Cheesman, a Mormon student at Brigham Young University, submitted a thesis that included a previously unpublished account by Joseph Smith in 1832 of his First Vision that contradicted the official account in the LDS scriptures. The Tanners published this account as well. Mormon scholars dismissed the Tanners as unsophisticated critics, but they were bringing to light facts about Mormon origins that the scholars could not explain away. The biggest bombshell fell in late 1967, when the LDS Church acquired fragments of the Egyptian papyri from which Joseph Smith had supposedly translated the Book of Abraham. Thought to have been destroyed, these papyri turned out to contain not writings of Abraham but pagan Egyptian funerary texts.

At the same time as these apologetic challenges were mounting, the LDS Church struggled to address the cultural challenge posed by the civil rights movement in America. Under criticism for its exclusion of blacks from the priesthood, the church issued official statements affirming the exclusion in 1949 and again in 1969. LDS presidents Joseph Fielding Smith (1970–72) and Harold B. Lee (1972–73) made no changes to the policy, but Spencer W. Kimball (1973–85) did. In a way, Kimball helped to force the issue by his 1974 revelation summoning all worthy young Mormon men to serve two years as full-time missionaries; the increasingly global church was unsustainable without permitting men of all races to hold offices. In 1978 he announced a revelation rescinding the exclusion of blacks from the priesthood (Official Declaration 2), though without repudiating the doctrine of the curse on which that policy had been based.

The mainstreaming of Mormonism continued under Presidents Ezra Taft Benson (1985–95), who had been Dwight Eisenhower’s secretary of agriculture; Howard W. Hunter (1995–96); and especially Gordon B. Hinckley (1995–2008). Hinckley set the tone for his presidency in the 1995 official statement The Family: A Proclamation to the World, emphasizing the strong family values of the Mormon faith. The Mormon evangelistic “pitch” became that it brings families together both in this life and, through its temple ceremonies, in the next. In a famous Time magazine interview in 1997, Hinckley downplayed the Mormon doctrine that God was once a human like us, a defensive strategy often seen to this day, although official sources still teach the doctrine. That same year InterVarsity Press published How Wide the Divide?, in which Mormon scholar Stephen Robinson and evangelical scholar Craig Blomberg discussed doctrine. Although admirably irenic, the book at various places understates the theological differences. Also in 1997, the number of Mormons was reported as ten million, more than half of them outside the US. Hinckley instituted an accelerated program of building temples worldwide even as the church’s missionary force was cresting at over fifty thousand a year. In 2000, the church built its one hundredth temple and had printed one hundred million copies of the Book of Mormon. When Hinckley died in 2008, there were more than a million Mormons in Mexico alone, and the number of Mormons in Africa had swelled from almost none before the 1978 revelation to more than a quarter of a million (although statisticians have shown that these membership figures are somewhat inflated because they ignore the large number of members who drop out).

Under President Thomas S. Monson (2008–18), the LDS Church struggled to come to terms with the information explosion created by the internet during his predecessor’s tenure and the intensified media focus on Mormonism due to the candidacy of Mitt Romney for US president in 2012. While Hinckley was still alive, the Church Historian’s Office had recognized the impossibility of suppressing documentation of LDS Church origins and history, and it began publishing such documents, many of which had formerly been available only from dissidents and former Mormons such as the Tanners. The problem reached a boiling point in 2013, when a group of European Mormons represented by Hans Mattson went public with unanswered questions he had presented to church leadership in 2010. In response to this and other negative publicity, the church’s official website published a series of articles addressing (if not satisfactorily answering) questions about the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham, Joseph Smith’s plural wives, the exclusion of blacks from the priesthood prior to 1978, and the like. What long-term effects these issues will have on Mormonism remains to be seen. Although growth has slowed, as of 2013 the LDS Church reported fifteen million members.

Beliefs. God. The LDS Church teaches that Heavenly Father is an exalted, immortal Man, possessing a body of flesh and bones. He has a wife, our heavenly mother, and these heavenly parents gave birth in heaven to billions of spirit children. Heavenly Father, with the participation of some of his children, organized this universe and formed the earth so that they would have a place to become physical, mortal beings, as a stage on the way to becoming (potentially) gods like their heavenly parents. Life on earth was to be a testing ground in which each person would have to exercise his or her free will by choosing to follow the Father’s plan. One of those spirit children, Lucifer, rejected Heavenly Father’s plan and led a large group of spirit children in heaven in rebellion. Another of God’s children, his firstborn son, Jesus, led the other spirits in accepting the Father’s plan. Heavenly Father, Jesus, and the Holy Ghost (perhaps another spirit son of the heavenly parents) are three separate Gods who together rule over this world as the Godhead.

Humans and the Church. Essential to this plan was the need for human beings to fall from innocence in order to become mortal. Mormons regard the fall of Adam as a blessing in disguise—a necessary step downward on the way to stepping up to higher glory through resurrection to immortality with the potential for godhood. To pave the way, Jesus agreed to be born on the earth as Heavenly Father’s only begotten son in the flesh, suffer and die, and then be resurrected. After his resurrection, Jesus commissioned apostles—both in Jerusalem and in the Americas—to be the leaders of the church in their hemispheres, each with two ongoing priesthoods through which members would perform temple rituals necessary for people to return to the celestial kingdom.

Apostasy and Restoration. Unfortunately, the church that Christ founded in the Americas perished, and the church that he started in Jerusalem became corrupt, eventually having no living apostles to lead it, no priesthood authority, no valid baptism or temple rituals, scriptures with important content removed, and a distorted understanding of Christian doctrine. Mormons call this disappearance of true Christianity the Great Apostasy; its return they call the Restoration. This Restoration began to take place when the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to Joseph Smith in 1820, told him that all the churches were wrong, and chose him to become the prophet through whom true Christianity would be restored. The Restoration is based on the scriptures of both ancient churches (the Bible and the Book of Mormon) and on other scriptures containing revelations received almost entirely by Smith—the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price. The latter is a hodgepodge of supposed ancient texts (Book of Moses, Book of Abraham) and other writings by Joseph Smith (notably the 1838 Joseph Smith—History, the account of the First Vision and the finding of the Book of Mormon and a brief list of LDS doctrines called the Articles of Faith). Just as important as these scriptures is the authority of the “living prophet” and of the male church hierarchy grounded in the restored priesthood orders.

Salvation and Eschatology. Since Mormonism teaches that all mortal humans were good spirits in heaven, “salvation” in effect means the opportunity to advance spiritually through sin and mortality in order to attain exaltation to Godhood. Jesus Christ’s suffering in Gethsemane and his death on the cross provided the atonement, which guarantees physical immortality to everyone (though a very small number of people, the “sons of perdition,” can deliberately throw it away by knowingly rejecting the Mormon gospel). Salvation in the narrow sense refers to attaining life in the celestial kingdom, which requires lifelong repentance (overcoming sin), faith in Christ as revealed in LDS teaching, baptism into the LDS faith, reception of the Holy Ghost by the laying-on of hands, and obedience to Mormon moral standards and religious commitments—tithing, drink and substance taboos, marriage in the temple, and regular participation in temple proxy baptisms for the dead. Those who do these things are on track to becoming exalted beings, or “gods,” like Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ. Those who do not may still be saved in a lesser heavenly realm, either the terrestrial kingdom for decent people or the telestial kingdom for the wicked, who must first suffer and accept the gospel in the spirit world. Those who died without a chance to accept the Mormon gospel may still reach the celestial kingdom. They will be given that chance in the spirit world, where faithful souls will preach the gospel to them and inform them of the proxy baptism and other rituals performed in the temples on their behalf.

Mormonism and Christianity. The relationship of the LDS faith to Christianity has been a bone of contention since the rise of the evangelical Christian “countercult” movement in the 1960s, pioneered by Walter Martin. In the interests of blunting criticisms of the church, Mormons commonly appeal to a minimalist definition of the term Christian that would apply to any individual or group that professed belief in Christ. Martin and many other evangelicals refer to Mormonism as a “cult,” generally meaning that the LDS religion is a heretical offshoot of Christianity that has denied essential doctrines of the faith. More sociological uses of the term cult complicated the discussion, especially after Jonestown (1978), since the term came to connote a socially or even criminally deviant sect—a meaning that might fairly be applied to nineteenth-century Mormonism but not to the contemporary LDS Church. Some scholars, including a few evangelicals, have resorted to labeling Mormonism a new world religion. Theologically, the LDS Church is best characterized as a heretical form of Christianity since it has Christ as its central religious figure but teaches a worldview and theology that clearly fall well outside the parameters of biblical, orthodox Christian faith.

Bibliography. Official Publications of the LDS Church: Church Almanac (annual); Church History in the Fulness of Times: Religion, 341–43; Gospel Principles; “Preach My Gospel”: A Guide to Missionary Service. Other Sources: R. Abanes, One Nation under Gods: A History of the Mormon Church; L. J. Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses; P. Barlow, Mormons and the Bible: The Place of the Latter-day Saints in American Religion; F. J. Beckwith, C. Mosser, and P. Owen, eds., The New Mormon Challenge; C. L. Blomberg and S. E. Robinson, How Wide the Divide? A Mormon and an Evangelical in Conversation; R. M. Bowman Jr., What Mormons Believe; N. G. Bringhurst and J. Hamer, eds., Scattering of the Saints: Schism within Mormonism; R. L. Bushman, Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction; W. R. Cross, The Burned-Over District; D. J. Davies, An Introduction to Mormonism; J. S. Dinger, ed., The Nauvoo City and High Council Minutes; T. Givens, People of Paradox: A History of Mormon Culture; C. R. Harrell, “This Is My Doctrine”: The Development of Mormon Theology; E. D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed (1834); D. H. Ludlow, ed., Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 4 vols.; H. M. Marquardt, The Rise of Mormonism, 1816–1844; W. Martin, The Maze of Mormonism; B. M. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine; B. McKeever and E. Johnson, Answering Mormons’ Questions; R. L. Millet et al., LDS Beliefs: A Doctrinal Reference; H. Nibley, The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, 19 vols.; R. N. Ostling and J. K. Ostling, Mormon America; G. H. Palmer, An Insider’s View of Mormon Origins; B. S. Plewe, ed., Mapping Mormonism: An Atlas of Latter-day Saint History; D. M. Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power; B. H. Roberts, ed., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 7 vols.; J. Shipps, Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons; J. Talmage, The Articles of Faith; J. and S. Tanner, The Changing World of Mormonism; G. Underwood, The Millenarian World of Early Mormonism; R. S. Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy: A History; D. Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents, 5 vols.; L. K. Wilder, Unveiling Grace: The Story of How We Found Our Way out of the Mormon Church.

R. M. Bowman Jr.

COMMUNITY OF CHRIST. Formerly called the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (or RLDS Church), the Community of Christ is the second-largest group to spring from the teachings of Joseph Smith Jr. The largest is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or LDS Church), commonly called the Mormon Church. The new name, Community of Christ, was adopted in 2001.

The church headquarters in Independence, Missouri, boasts a landmark spiral-shaped temple, where no sacred ordinances or private rituals occur (unlike the temple of the LDS Church). The temple is used for public teaching and the promotion of world peace. The church publishes the Saints Herald, read by most members, and owns Graceland University (Lamoni, Iowa), a liberal arts school where it trains many of its prospective clergy. Clergy roles (pastor, elder, etc.) are open to both men and women and are unpaid. The Community of Christ has about 250,000 members in forty countries. Only 60 percent of its members are Americans or Canadians; most of the church growth occurs overseas. Unlike the LDS Church, the Community of Christ does not have an organized, socially mandated missionary program.

History and Origins. When Joseph Smith Jr. was assassinated in 1844, no plans for a successor to his office were in place. Smith had blessed his son, Joseph Smith III, to follow him as prophet but did not expect to die so soon. At the time of Smith’s death, his son was twelve years old.

A majority of the LDS Church’s members followed Brigham Young when he left Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1846, but Joseph Smith’s widow Emma stayed behind. Several other leaders vied for the prophetic mantle after Smith’s death. In 1853 a handful of people met in Beloit, Wisconsin, to establish a “New Organization” of the original church, opposed to several doctrines taught in Utah or by other rival churches. They solicited Joseph Smith III to be the prophet and president. Emma Smith encouraged her son to accept the role, and he accepted in 1860.

The Reorganized Church was initially defined in contrast with the much larger church in Utah. Both churches then accepted the doctrine of “one true church,” which had fallen into apostasy after the first century and was restored in the latter days of the nineteenth century. God had provided a unique and restored gospel, priesthood, authority, teachings, and scriptures. This is the essence of the restorationist message, promoted in other movements besides Mormonism.

Doctrinal Distinctives. The RLDS Church distinctives focused on a few items: opposition to polygamy, different sets of scripture, opposition to LDS temple rituals, and belief that the “true successor” to the prophet must be a direct descendant of Joseph Smith Jr. The RLDS Church denies being “Mormon” since the term is typically used to indicate the LDS Church, with its unique theology and praxis.

The founders of the New Organization believed Joseph Smith had practiced polygamy (or been misled by others), but Emma Smith denied it and Joseph Smith III never believed it. For most of its history, the RLDS Church asserted that not only was polygamy a false doctrine but it was never practiced by Joseph Smith Jr. in Nauvoo.

In 1867 the RLDS Church issued “an inspired revision of the Authorized Version, by Joseph Smith, Jr.” (title page), which it now commonly calls the Inspired Version, based on manuscripts donated by Emma Smith. The result was a book superficially like the King James Version, with many differences. The book of Genesis was revised the most: after Adam’s fall, he “blessed God” and “began to prophesy” for the joy that would follow; Adam and Eve were baptized by immersion “in the name of Jesus Christ,” were “born again,” and received the gift of the Holy Ghost; the mark on Cain (son of Adam) and on Canaan (son of Ham) was black skin; not just Enoch but the city of Enoch was translated to heaven; and several passages were added or changed to predict the coming of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon. The Song of Solomon was deleted entirely because it is “not inspired writing.” Smith attempted to reconcile perceived contradictions in the Bible; the church now rewords the Lord’s Prayer from “lead us not into temptation” to “suffer us not to be led into temptation.”

The RLDS and the LDS Churches followed two different trajectories regarding the Book of Mormon, which was originally published with chapter divisions but no versification. The two churches introduced versification independently, and the LDS Church increased the number of chapters in its edition. In 1966 the RLDS Church introduced a modern English version of the Book of Mormon, eliminating archaic forms of speech.

The churches also followed different paths with the Doctrine and Covenants (D&C). The RLDS version has fewer revelations from Joseph Smith. It excised the revelation on plural marriage (sec. 132), baptism for the dead, and other esoteric topics. On the other hand, the RLDS version regularly added a new inspired revelation to its D&C with each biennial world conference. Since the death of Joseph Smith Jr., the Utah church has added sections to its D&C extremely rarely.

The RLDS Church did not accept the Pearl of Great Price used by the Utah church, though much of the Book of Moses (Smith’s revision of Genesis) emerged in the Inspired Version. Taken together, the Bible, the Book of Mormon, and the Doctrine and Covenants make up the standard works of the church. (The Inspired Version is rarely used today.)

In terms of liturgy and ritual, the RLDS founders believed that the ordinances introduced in Nauvoo were partially responsible for Joseph Smith Jr.’s premature death. The RLDS rejected in toto the building of temples and the LDS ordinances of baptism for the dead, plural marriage, celestial marriage (marriage “for time and eternity”), sealings, receiving the keys to the Melchizedek priesthood, and the wearing of the garments of the holy priesthood. The sole exception was the expectation that some day in the future, the true temple would be rebuilt in Independence, Missouri, on a spot designated by Joseph Smith Jr. as the “temple lot,” after which spiritual manifestations would flourish.

Together with rejecting the temple ordinances, the RLDS Church also rejected much of the underlying theology, including the LDS principles of a plurality of Gods, human exaltation to deity (through sacred temple rituals), the belief that God the Father has a tangible body of flesh and bones, and the belief in a Heavenly Mother.

A final distinctive in the early days of the reorganization was the belief that the “true successor” of Joseph Smith Jr. must be a direct, male descendant. The church capitalized on the fact that Joseph Smith Jr. had given a prophetic blessing to his son, asserting that this pronouncement must be fulfilled in establishing the lawful guidance of the true church.

Social and Cultural Values. Since the RLDS Church has often been confused with the LDS Church by a generally undiscerning public, the RLDS Church has received criticism, rejection, and even persecution for its faith. The RLDS / Community of Christ family can recall episodes of religious persecution into twentieth-century America. Consequently, their driving social consciousness is one of peace. Their corporate emblem for many years was a picture of a young child standing over a lion and a lamb, a picture of the messianic age of peace. The temple in Independence is built as a “place for peace,” and a core offering today is the Peacebuilding Ministries department for reconciliation and conflict resolution.

Another core concept in the RLDS / Community of Christ is that of Zion, which they understand not in a biblical fashion (Zion is the name of the hill Jerusalem sits on, often synonymous with the city of Jerusalem) but in a prophetic and millennial context. Zion, to them, is a metaphor for a peaceful community, both social and religious, which ideally should go forth beginning at the Center Place (i.e., Independence) but should represent a vision of a life and world transformed and brought into the love of God.

The Community of Christ today has much of the feel of a liberal Protestant church, including a strong commitment to social action, a denial of religious exclusivism, and an emphasis on peace and meditation. Homosexuality is tolerated within the Community of Christ, and the next issue to rise in the future will be the ordination of practicing homosexuals. A recent revelation in the Doctrine and Covenants (section 163) seems to make room for this, and the topic has been open for discussion for some time.

Developments since 1960. The RLDS Church went through massive shifts in the 1960s, possibly beginning with the installation of W. Wallace Smith as prophet/president in 1958. Believing that “the glory of God is intelligence” (D&C 90:6a), the church emphasized academic training. Church leaders in Independence were sent to St. Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, where they were immersed in the theological liberalism and neo-orthodoxy prevalent at the school. The effect was to bring the leadership much closer to the classical ecclesiology, while at the same time undercutting their views on scriptural reliability.

In 1967–68 a series of private meetings in the Department of Religious Education resulted in a collection called the Position Papers, raising questions going to the core of the Restoration message. The papers were restricted from public circulation. They gave evidence why the Book of Mormon was a product of the nineteenth century. They suggested that Smith’s changes in the Inspired Version had no textual basis and did not “restore” anything originally lost. The Bible itself was deemed unreliable. Position Papers also questioned the notion of Apostasy and Restoration.

The publication of Restoration Scriptures in 1969 by church historian Richard P. Howard revealed that Joseph Smith Jr. had used a “divining rod” in obtaining some revelations for the Doctrine and Covenants but had changed the revelations to hide this in later printings. Sunday school lesson materials indicated that Joseph Smith Jr. himself taught the plurality of Gods and that God was once a man.

In 1970 the RLDS Church moved three revelations by Joseph Smith Jr. pertaining to baptism for the dead from the main body of its Doctrine and Covenants to the appendix. Twenty years later, the world conference voted to remove the appendix. In 1979 another summit conference under the First Presidency of the RLDS Church resulted in The Presidential Papers, a set of documents that promoted classic Christian teaching while rejecting the belief in “one true church.”

The Bible and the Book of Mormon were now deemed human compositions. The touchstone for revolt was the revelation permitting the ordination of women (1984) since the foundational priesthood revelations did not allow it. The members holding traditional views were marginalized, and although congregations were supposed to be locally governed, legal measures were taken to force the dissenters out of the mainline RLDS Church. They now survive as various independent congregations, usually with the word Restored or Restoration prefixed to their title.

The 1984 revelation on the ordination of women also gave permission to build the temple in Independence, without regard to the previously designated “temple lot.” The temple was constructed and dedicated in 1994. The doctrine of “close communion” was revoked in 1994 by a policy change (not a revelation). Historically, only baptized members had been permitted to partake of the communion emblems. Now any visitors who wished to partake were free to do so.

In 1996 the RLDS distinctive of presidential succession was given up when Wallace B. Smith, who had no heirs, presented a revelation naming W. Grant McMurray to the presidency. The RLDS Church changed its name to the Community of Christ in stages between 2000 and 2001, though the corporate name persisted for legal reasons.

In 2004 Grant McMurray stepped down and was replaced by Stephen M. Veazey as the president of the Community of Christ.

Bibliography. Community of Christ, “Community of Christ: Core Values,” pamphlet; Community of Christ, “Community of Christ: Faith and Beliefs,” pamphlet; Community of Christ, “Community of Christ: Sacraments,” pamphlet; Community of Christ, “A Journey People: The Community of Christ Story,” http://www.cofchrist.org/history/; Department of Religious Education, Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Position Papers (1968); First Presidency, Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Presidential Papers (1979); C. Hansen, Reorganized Latter Day Saint Church: Is It Christian?; R. P. Howard, Restoration Scriptures: A Study of Their Textual Development; P. A. Judd, Who Are the Saints? An Introduction to the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints; P. T. Trask, Part-Way to Utah: The Forgotten Mormons.

E. Pement

CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY. According to the doctrine of conditional immortality, commonly referred to as conditionalism or annihilationism, human immortality is conditional on salvation by God. In the view of this doctrine’s proponents, who include Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christadelphians, all stripes of Adventists, and a number of well-known evangelical theologians, God eternally preserves in existence only those human beings whom he eternally saves. Everyone else he simply annihilates. Four principal arguments undergird the conditionalist position.

Eternal Torment Is Unjust. First, apologists for conditionalism argue, it would be unjust of God to consign any human being to eternal torment because, as finite creatures, human beings cannot incur the infinite guilt that alone could merit eternal punishment. Christians who retain historic orthodoxy, by contrast, maintain that the gravity of an offense increases proportionally with the dignity of the party offended. A sin against a parent thus incurs more guilt than a sin against a sibling; a sin against a high-ranking public official incurs more guilt than a sin against a parent; and so on.

God is of infinite dignity, the orthodox argue, and every sin constitutes an offense against him. Even one sin by a human being thus incurs infinite guilt and merits infinite punishment. The suffering of a finite creature over a finite time, however long, cannot constitute an infinite punishment. According to the historic Christian view, therefore, God’s justice not only permits but also requires him to inflict eternal misery on all human beings whose debt of punishment Christ does not pay by his sacrifice on the cross. God does unsaved sinners no injustice, therefore, when he condemns them to eternal, conscious affliction.

Christ’s Death Is Sufficient Penalty. Second, annihilationists argue that since Scripture identifies death as the penalty Christ paid for human sins, mere human beings cannot deserve a punishment graver than death, for if they did, Christ’s death would not suffice to pay their debt of punishment. This argument reflects a gross underestimate of the value of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Although Christ suffered only in his human nature, the orthodox hold, he suffered as a divine person, whose infinite value makes his sacrifice infinitely meritorious and consequently sufficient to satisfy the debt of punishment that all human beings owe God.

God’s Promise to Adam Contradicts Eternal Punishment. Third, conditionalists argue, those who identify the punishment divinely ordained for sin as eternal torment thereby impugn the honesty of God, for God promised Adam that if he ate of the forbidden fruit, he would merely die (Gen. 2:17). He said nothing about eternal torment. To counter this argument, it seems, one need merely note that in Genesis 2:17 God also promised Adam that he would die on the day in which he tasted the forbidden fruit. If divine honesty requires that God fulfill this promise in the most crudely literal sense, then Scripture itself convicts God of dishonesty by reporting that Adam lived 930 years (Gen. 5:5). One who regards Scripture as the word of him who “does not lie” (Titus 1:2), it seems, would do better to interpret God’s promise by its fulfillment than to impose on the text a prima facie plausible sense that Scripture as a whole falsifies.

Eternal Punishment Does Not Mean Eternal Existence. Fourth, annihilationists typically argue, the orthodox stance on the eternal punishment of the wicked effaces the difference between life and death. To equate the eternal destruction that Scripture promises the wicked with everlasting existence, however painful, they argue, is to empty biblical language of its obvious meaning. To this, perhaps the most powerful of conditionalist arguments, the orthodox response is fourfold.

First, certain texts of Scripture seem to indicate that those subject to eternal destruction and death endure ceaseless pain in consequence of sins committed before their natural death. In Isaiah 66:24 (NRSV), for instance, one reads that “they [i.e., the godly] shall go out and look at the dead bodies of the people who have rebelled against me; for their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched.” By the last sentence in this passage, Isaiah cannot mean merely that the worms and the flames do not expire until they have consumed their victims, for he utters the sentence precisely in order to explain why the corpses are not consumed but rather remain for the godly to behold. Likewise, in Revelation 14:11, one reads that for those who “worship the beast and its image” “the smoke of their torment will rise forever and ever. There will be no rest day or night [for them].” See also especially Matthew 18:8; 25:41; Mark 9:43, 48.

Second, to persons in extreme distress, cessation of existence constitutes not a curse but a blessing. Moses (Num. 11:15), Samson (Judg. 16:30), Elijah (1 Kings 19:4), and Jonah (Jon. 4:3) pray that God would slay them. Saul (1 Sam. 31:4), his armor bearer (1 Sam. 31:5), Ahithophel (2 Sam. 17:23), and Zimri (1 Kings 16:18) slay themselves. The wicked will say to the mountains, “Fall on us” (Hos. 10:8; Luke 23:30; Rev. 6:16); they “will seek death but will not find it” (Rev. 9:6; cf. Jer. 8:3). Countless human beings in dire circumstances have felt with Agag: “Surely the bitterness of death is past” (1 Sam. 15:32). If the ultimate punishment of the wicked is to constitute a penalty and not a reprieve, then, it must consist in something harsher than annihilation.

Third, death and destruction constitute apt metaphors for that “living death,” that condition so miserable that it would have been better for those in it not to have been born (Matt. 26:24; Mark 14:21), which Scripture identifies as the final destiny of the impenitent. Fourth and finally, the eternal life God promises the redeemed consists not merely in an infinitely prolonged existence but in indescribable bliss. When the orthodox construe the eternal destruction ordained for the wicked as never-ending agony, therefore, they do not obliterate the antithesis between eternal life and eternal death. Rather, they sharpen it.

Bibliography. K. D. Boa and R. M. Bowman Jr., Sense and Nonsense about Heaven and Hell; L. E. Froom, The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, 2 vols.; E. W. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes: The Biblical Case for Conditional Immortality, 3rd ed.; E. W. Fudge and R. A. Peterson, Two Views of Hell: A Biblical and Theological Dialogue; M. J. Harris, Raised Immortal: Resurrection and Immortality in the New Testament; R. W. Landis, The Immortality of the Soul and the Final Condition of the Wicked Carefully Considered; R. Morey, Death and the Afterlife; C. W. Morgan and Robert A. Peterson, Hell under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents Eternal Punishment; R. A. Peterson, Hell on Trial: The Case for Eternal Punishment.

D. W. Jowers

CONFUCIANISM. Not a formal religion in the traditional sense, Confucianism is a humanistic philosophical system responsible for forming some of the most common aspects of what is sometimes called “the Asian mind-set.” Although it is impossible to determine how many are strict followers of Confucianism, certainly the Confucian way of thinking continues to dominate Asian culture. As Thomas Leung notes, if 90 percent of the 1.3 billion Chinese, 126 million Japanese, 26 million Koreans, and 74 million Vietnamese are influenced by Confucianism, this would equal approximately 1.5 billion people (Halverson, 70).

The name Confucius (551–479 BC) is the Latin version of the Chinese name Kung Fu-tzu, meaning “Grand Master Kong.” Confucius was born of an aristocratic family in the ancient province of Lu, which is currently the Shandong province. Confucius’s father died when he was very young, so his mother raised him with a special awareness of education. Having grown up during a time of social disorder in Chinese history, Confucius decided at a young age to become a scholar in poetry and historical Chinese tradition. He believed the path to peace and order was tied to the ancients. When his mother died, the twenty-three-year-old Confucius mourned her death for three years by living in isolation.

Tradition says that Confucius held different government positions, including service as the prime minister of his province. However, he was a failure in politics. At age fifty-six, Confucius left home and wandered the country for thirteen years with some of his disciples. His goal was to restore the cultural-political order of his day by emphasizing the ritual-music culture, a humanistic system introduced during the Zhou Dynasty (1122–770 BC) and intended to create harmony in human relationships. However, his quest to establish peace and security failed, so he returned home at age sixty-eight to teach and write. He died five years later, apparently convinced that his life had been a failure.

Confucius was an extraordinary ethical teacher who stressed individual responsibility and living virtuously with proper personal reflection. He believed that a person who strove for good character while revering his elders and following moral guides of conduct was to be emulated. Claiming to be only a transmitter, not the originator, of his teachings, Confucius held that humankind was naturally good. He listed five cardinal virtues: jen (the greatest virtue, which is to seek the good of others), yi (righteousness by justice), li (religious and moral ways of acting), chih (wisdom), and hsin (faithfulness). Confucius denied the existence of a personal God who would be interested in the mundane happenings of humankind. Rather, an impersonal heaven (t’ien) can be attained through jen by seeking the common good of all people.

The current Asian way of thinking certainly has roots in Confucian ideas. As Huston Smith has written, “Though Confucius did not author Chinese culture, he remains its supreme editor” (160). For instance, Confucius believed in the importance of family loyalty and maintaining a hierarchical line. Filial piety (hsiao) gives special reverence to age, with elders receiving full respect since they are said to possess wisdom. The viability of the family structure is also emphasized. A young man is expected to obey his father in all things until the father dies; at that time, the eldest brother is considered the authority. The one at the top of the hierarchical ladder has a tremendous responsibility to lead by example. The goal in Confucianism is to pass one’s influence to one’s descendants. Confucius endorsed ancestor worship, although he intended to promote respectfulness in regard to one’s forebears rather than the literal worshiping of spirits. Today ancestor worship with the hope of obtaining good fortune is a common practice in many Asian homes.

Mencius (ca. 372–289 BC) is considered the second-greatest Confucian teacher. He further developed the concept of jen, teaching that the word hsin (which can mean “heart-mind” as well as “faithfulness”) and the term hsin-hsing (heart-mind nature) are references to the good that all people have in their inner beings. Self-reflection and self-cultivation are ways to fully realize one’s potential, as people are evil only when they forget that they are good. These ideas of innate righteousness were later contradicted by Xunzi, a Confucian leader who lived during the mid-200s BC. He taught that a right education and legislation of good conduct were necessary to lead people to correct action. Without a strong law, he said, nations falter. Although Mencius and Xunzi disagreed, they did agree about humankind’s inherent potential for goodness.

Confucianism became China’s state religion during the Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220), to the exclusion of other religions. The Confucian Code of Conduct dominated the Chinese landscape as the literate elite who entered the monarchy were educated in this system. Confucianism’s influence waned when Buddhism dominated China between 500 and 850. However, Confucianism was revived during the Song Dynasty (960–1280). Chinese philosophers who were known as Neo-Confucianists combined Buddhist ideas with Confucian thought. The teachings of Confucius were emphasized, while Mencius was touted as the Second Sage. Confucianism remained the dominant Chinese philosophy until the Republic of China was founded in 1911.

Because Confucianism was blamed for China’s lack of modernization, many eagerly accepted Mao’s introduction of Communistic philosophy. The 1949 revolution and the birth of the People’s Republic of China saw Communism overtake Confucianism as the official ideology. Confucianism was rekindled in the 1980s.

Confucianism’s canon contains thirteen scriptures, including nine scriptures compiled in the Five Classics. They are the Book of Changes (I Ching), the Book of Poetry and Songs (Shih Ching), the Book of Documents (Shu Ching), the Book of Rites (Li Chi), and the Book of Spring and Autumn (Chun Chiu). The last two works contain a total of three scriptures each. In addition, the Four Books were more influential than the Five Classics, becoming the official standard for educators after the fourteenth century AD. The Four Books are composed of the Analects (Lun Yu, a collection of famous Confucian sayings—which were not written by Confucius but rather were compiled by his disciples—considered the most important source of material on Confucius), the Great Learning (Ta Hsueh), the Doctrine of the Mean (Chung Yung), and the Book of Mencius.

Bibliography. D. L. Carmody and T. L. Brink, Ways to the Center: An Introduction to World Religions, 4th ed.; A. M. Frazier, Readings in Eastern Religious Thought: Chinese and Japanese Religions, vol. 3; D. C. Halverson, The Compact Guide to World Religions; D. S. and J. B. Noss, A History of the World’s Religions, 8th ed.; H. Smith, The Religions of Man.

E. Johnson

CONFUCIUS. Confucius (551–479 BC) was a Chinese thinker and social philosopher whose ideas influenced the developing religious thoughts of Eastern people-groups. At age fifty-three, he was appointed head of the Department of Justice in the state of Lu, but he left because of corruption within the state (Chenglie, 100). He then began a long journey in northeast and central China expounding his political philosophy until age sixty-eight. Confucius died at seventy-three and was buried at Sishang, north of the capital of Lu (Chenglie, 266). The most famous writings about Confucius are the Analects, which record the words and acts of both Confucius and his disciples. This book is thought to be the most reliable source for thoughts on his philosophy (Ni, 6).