The words worth knowing

Traditions use it differently

How far accommodation extends is one of the real questions behind debates over inerrancy and over Genesis. All sides use the principle; they disagree about whether it covers only the manner of speaking or also the incidental furniture of an ancient worldview.

Traditions use it differently

The Antiochene fathers pushed back against Alexandrian allegory in the fourth century, and the Reformers largely rejected the fourfold method for the plain sense, though Luther kept using allegory when it suited him. Modern scholarship has been reconsidering premodern reading rather than simply dismissing it, on the grounds that the Fathers were often asking better questions than they are given credit for.

Traditions use it differently

A minority position with a real pedigree, held in the early church by Arnobius, defended in the modern era by John Stott tentatively, John Wenham, Edward Fudge, and Anglican evangelicals among others. The traditional view of eternal conscious punishment remains the majority across Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant teaching, and several confessions rule the alternative out by name.

Traditions use it differently

How far the language reaches is a genuine question, not a dodge. Classical theology treats it as accommodation, God speaking in a register creatures can hear. Open theists argue that some of it, especially texts where God relents or is grieved, reports something real about how God relates to time and to us rather than being figurative.

Traditions use it differently

Catholics and Orthodox receive most of them as Scripture and call them deuterocanonical, a second canon rather than a lesser one. Protestants generally do not, though the King James printed them in a separate section and Luther called them useful to read.

Traditions use it differently

Whether a true believer can commit it is precisely the perseverance question. The warning passages in Hebrews are the battleground, and every tradition has to do something with them.

Traditions use it differently

Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican traditions hold it, and disagree about whose lines are valid. Rome declared Anglican orders invalid in 1896; Anglicans dispute the reasoning. Most Protestant traditions substitute succession in apostolic teaching for succession in office, arguing that faithfulness to the apostles' doctrine is what the New Testament actually requires.

Traditions use it differently

Anglicans generally maintain it; most Protestant bodies hold that succession is in apostolic teaching rather than in a chain of hands.

Traditions use it differently

Condemned at Nicaea in 325 and again at Constantinople in 381, and rejected by every historic tradition since. Worth knowing accurately: Arius was not a fool, and his concern was to protect God's oneness. The council judged that his solution cost more than it saved, because a creature cannot save.

Traditions use it differently

Often caricatured as salvation by human effort. Arminians reply that no one seeks God unaided and that prevenient grace does the enabling.

Traditions use it differently

The Reformers made assurance ordinary and expected, against a late medieval piety in which it was presumptuous. Catholic teaching still holds that no one has infallible certainty of final perseverance apart from special revelation, while affirming confident hope. Wesley located assurance in the witness of the Spirit. Puritan practice, in trying to test it, sometimes produced the anxiety it meant to cure.

Traditions use it differently

Orthodoxy affirms the substance while refusing the term as the West uses it, since the divine essence is held to be unknowable even in glory; what is seen is the uncreated light. Aquinas and Palamas are the usual names attached to the two accounts, and the disagreement is old and unresolved.

Traditions use it differently

Whether monogenes means only-begotten or unique is debated; many modern translations render it one and only. The creedal point does not rest on that translation.

Traditions use it differently

The five points summarised at Dort were an ANSWER to the Arminian articles, not a summary Calvin wrote. Many who hold the theology dislike the label.

Traditions use it differently

Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox canons differ in the Old Testament and agree entirely on the New.

Traditions use it differently

Continuationists reply that no text says so, and that the case rests on inference. The question barely existed before 1906.

Traditions use it differently

Catholic teaching holds that baptism removes original sin's guilt but leaves concupiscence, which is not itself sin though it inclines toward it. The Reformers rejected that distinction and insisted the remaining disorder is genuinely sin, which is why Luther described the Christian as simultaneously justified and a sinner.

Traditions use it differently

How binding it is varies enormously: some require full subscription, some subscription to the system of doctrine, and some treat confessions as descriptive only.

Traditions use it differently

Lutherans generally reject the word. They affirm a real presence in, with and under the elements while declining to explain the mechanism, and consubstantiation names an explanation they did not offer.

Traditions use it differently

How the covenants relate is one of the deepest dividing lines in Protestant theology. Covenant theology reads them as successive administrations of one covenant of grace, which is why it baptizes infants. Dispensationalism reads them as distinct arrangements with a lasting distinction between Israel and the church. Most Catholic and Orthodox theology works with neither system.

Traditions use it differently

Dispensationalism divides history into distinct eras and keeps Israel and the church permanently distinct. The disagreement drives much of how each side reads prophecy.

Traditions use it differently

Some traditions, particularly Baptist and Restorationist, decline to use creeds as tests of fellowship, holding that Scripture alone should bind. They usually still agree with the content.

Traditions use it differently

Some churches describe themselves as having no creed but the Bible. Critics note that this is itself a creedal statement, and that every church teaches something in particular.

Traditions use it differently

They also complicate the picture, since some scrolls agree with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text, showing more than one Hebrew text form circulating. That is a finding about textual history, not about reliability.

Traditions use it differently

Trent defined them as canonical in 1546. Protestants followed Jerome's preference for the Hebrew canon. Orthodoxy accepts them without having defined the list as tightly. Worth knowing: Jesus and the apostles quote the Septuagint, which contained them, but never quote these particular books as Scripture.

Traditions use it differently

Covenant theology, the older Reformed alternative, reads the covenants as one unfolding plan and sees the church as continuous with Israel. Progressive dispensationalism has moved substantially toward that position. Catholic and Orthodox theology work with neither framework.

Traditions use it differently

Covenant theology reads Scripture as one continuous covenant story and sees the church as continuous with Israel. The disagreement drives much of how each side reads prophecy.

Traditions use it differently

Affirmed across Catholic, Orthodox, and confessional Protestant tradition. Orthodoxy qualifies it with the essence and energies distinction. A number of modern analytic and evangelical theologians have challenged it as more Greek than biblical, and others have defended it as the only way to keep God from becoming one more item in the universe.

Traditions use it differently

Rejected by every historic tradition, but worth knowing because the instinct behind it keeps returning: a piety that finds the physical embarrassing, that treats the body as a container for the real you, or that cannot say God actually died. The creeds insist on suffered, died, and was buried for exactly this reason.

Traditions use it differently

How much is dogma varies enormously. Catholicism has a defined and countable set. Orthodoxy treats the seven councils as dogmatic and resists adding. Most Protestant bodies have confessions rather than dogmas, and the difference in how binding those are is itself a difference between traditions.

Traditions use it differently

Vatican II committed the Catholic Church to it. The World Council of Churches has pursued it since 1948. Critics across traditions worry that unity purchased by vagueness is not worth having, and some conservative bodies decline to participate on that ground. The 1999 Joint Declaration on justification is the usual example of what it can achieve.

Traditions use it differently

Its point was pastoral: a corrupt priest cannot invalidate your baptism. The Donatists had argued otherwise in the fourth century and Augustine answered them. Protestant traditions accepted that answer while rejecting the wider framework built on it.

Traditions use it differently

It follows from the regulative principle, that worship should include only what Scripture positively commands. Those who disagree hold that Scripture's silence permits rather than forbids.

Traditions use it differently

Which word translates the Greek hilasterion is a live argument, and translations differ. It is not merely lexical: it bears on whether the cross deals with guilt, with wrath, or with both.

Traditions use it differently

The East objects both to the theology, holding that it confuses the persons, and to the procedure, that the West altered a creed agreed by an ecumenical council without one.

Traditions use it differently

How much general revelation yields is disputed. Aquinas held that reason can establish God's existence. Barth resisted natural theology fiercely, holding that God is known only where he speaks. Calvin allowed a sense of divinity in all people while insisting sin distorts it.

Traditions use it differently

Traditions differ over whether grace can be resisted, whether it is given to all, and whether it works through the sacraments. Nobody disagrees that salvation is by grace.

Traditions use it differently

Hebrews applies the title to Christ at length, which is a deliberate difficulty, since he was from Judah and not from Levi. The letter answers it by appealing to Melchizedek, a priest who appears in Genesis with no genealogy at all.

Traditions use it differently

Textual criticism is used by everyone, including the most conservative translators. Higher criticism is where the fights are, especially the documentary hypothesis for the Pentateuch and questions of which letters Paul wrote. Traditions range from wholesale rejection to full adoption, and there are careful scholars at most points on that line.

Traditions use it differently

Baptists and others hold the Greek word baptizo means to immerse and that the mode is part of the meaning; others hold the mode is indifferent.

Traditions use it differently

How to hold this alongside passages where God is said to relent or to be grieved is an old question. Classical theism reads those as accommodated language; other approaches take them more directly.

Traditions use it differently

One of the sharpest reversals in modern theology. The tradition affirmed impassibility nearly unanimously. After the twentieth century's catastrophes, Moltmann and many others argued for a God who suffers with the world, and much contemporary preaching assumes it. Defenders of the older view reply that a God who is moved by suffering is a God who might be overcome by it, and that the cross is God acting rather than God being damaged.

Traditions use it differently

Catholic doctrine retains indulgences while the Council of Trent abolished the sale of them and condemned the abuses. Protestant and Orthodox traditions reject the underlying account of a treasury of merit. Being accurate about what the doctrine claims is worth more than the caricature, since the actual sixteenth-century abuse was bad enough on its own terms.

Traditions use it differently

The distinction matters. Some traditions affirm both, some affirm infallibility while declining the stronger term, and the words are used loosely enough that it is always worth asking what a particular speaker means.

Traditions use it differently

Paul says to depart and be with Christ is far better, and that he would prefer to be absent from the body and at home with the Lord, which most traditions read as conscious fellowship immediately at death. Others point out that the New Testament calls the dead asleep more than fifteen times, that Paul's comfort to the bereaved in 1 Thessalonians 4 is the resurrection rather than an intermediate reunion, and that from the sleeper's side no time passes at all. Catholic teaching adds purgation for those who die in grace but imperfect.

Traditions use it differently

Protestants have generally understood it as God declaring a sinner righteous on account of Christ, with righteousness credited rather than infused. Catholic teaching describes it as God making a person actually righteous, a process rather than a single verdict. The 1999 Joint Declaration between Lutherans and the Catholic Church found substantial agreement while leaving real differences.

Traditions use it differently

What exactly was emptied is disputed. Some hold he set aside the independent use of divine attributes; others that he added humanity without subtracting anything. The text says he emptied himself and does not specify of what.

Traditions use it differently

Protestants have often argued the distinction collapses in practice. Catholics and Orthodox reply that it is precisely the distinction the commandment turns on, and that they observe it.

Traditions use it differently

The Levites received no land, and were told the LORD was their inheritance instead, which is where the phrase comes from when the psalms apply it to anyone.

Traditions use it differently

Catholics distinguish levels: solemn definitions demand assent of faith, ordinary teaching demands religious submission, and most teaching is neither infallible nor trivial. Orthodoxy locates authority in the whole church expressed through councils, with no single see having the final word. Protestants hold sola scriptura, which does not mean rejecting tradition but denying it independent authority.

Traditions use it differently

The two lists are answering different questions, which is why they coexist without resolving anything. The creedal marks describe what the church is; the Reformation marks were meant to let a congregation know whether to stay. Some traditions add church discipline as a third mark.

Traditions use it differently

It is the base text for nearly all Old Testament translation, and its accuracy was dramatically confirmed by the Dead Sea Scrolls. Where it differs from the Septuagint, translators must choose, and Orthodox tradition weights the Septuagint more heavily than Western churches do.

Traditions use it differently

The medieval distinction was between condign merit, which strictly deserves a reward, and congruent merit, which God graciously counts as fitting. The Reformers rejected the category for justification entirely. Catholic teaching holds that merit itself is a gift, since God crowns his own gifts in us, a line from Augustine that Trent quotes. Much Protestant polemic aims at a version of merit that Catholic theology also rejects.

Traditions use it differently

Historically labelled monophysite, one nature, by opponents. These churches reject that label, and recent joint declarations with Rome and Constantinople have affirmed a shared faith in different words.

Traditions use it differently

Reformed theology is monergistic about regeneration. Wesleyan, Arminian, Catholic, and Orthodox theology are synergistic in some form, though Orthodoxy means something particular by it and would reject the charge that grace is thereby made a junior partner. The labels get used as insults more often than as descriptions.

Traditions use it differently

The Oriental Orthodox churches reject the label as a misdescription and say miaphysite, one incarnate nature FROM two, fully God and fully human. Recent joint declarations with Rome and Constantinople affirm a shared faith in different words.

Traditions use it differently

Both labels are contested by the churches they were applied to. The Assyrian Church of the East rejects the Nestorian label, and the Oriental Orthodox churches describe their position as miaphysite, one incarnate nature of the Word, not monophysite. Modern dialogues have produced joint statements finding that much of the split was about vocabulary rather than substance, though the churches remain separate.

Traditions use it differently

Traditions differ on how much continuity there is between this creation and the next, and on whether the present earth is renewed or replaced. 2 Peter 3:10 has been read both ways, and depends on a textual variant: some manuscripts say the earth will be burned up, the earliest say it will be found or laid bare.

Traditions use it differently

Open theists argue that the future free choices of creatures are not yet there to be known, and that this limits nothing about God. The overwhelming majority of Christian traditions reject that and hold that God knows the future exhaustively.

Traditions use it differently

The choice of word is the point: ordinance stresses obedience to a command, sacrament stresses that God is doing something through it.

Traditions use it differently

The great East and West divide. Western theology after Augustine has generally held that guilt as well as corruption is inherited, which is why infant baptism was pressed so hard. Eastern Orthodoxy speaks of ancestral sin: we inherit mortality and a damaged nature, but not another person's guilt. Both agree we cannot heal ourselves. Pelagius denied the doctrine altogether and was condemned in 418.

Traditions use it differently

Reformed and most Baptist theology affirm it. Wesleyan, Arminian, Catholic, and Orthodox teaching hold that a person can finally fall away, pointing to Hebrews 6 and the sheer number of New Testament warnings. Note that the Reformed version is not once saved always safe: it insists that the genuinely converted will in fact persevere in faith, which is a claim about evidence as much as about security.

Traditions use it differently

A Reformation doctrine, and carefully limited even by those who hold it: the Westminster Confession says not all things are alike clear, and that the plain things are the main things. Catholic and Orthodox critics point at the number of Protestant denominations as evidence against it. Defenders reply that the core is agreed across all those denominations, and that the disputes are at the edges.

Traditions use it differently

Calvinists hold election to be unconditional and grace finally irresistible; Arminians hold that God's choice takes foreseen faith into account and that grace can be refused; Lutherans affirm election to salvation but decline to teach a decree of reprobation.

Traditions use it differently

Everyone affirms that God moves first. The question is whether that first move can be finally resisted. Arminians say yes, which is what makes the choice real. Calvinists say the grace that saves is effectual, and distinguish it from a general grace that can be refused.

Traditions use it differently

A Reformation rallying cry, and frequently overread. Luther used it to deny a spiritual caste, not to abolish ordained ministry, which he continued to insist on. Catholic teaching affirms a common priesthood of the baptized alongside the ministerial priesthood, and Vatican II says they differ in kind and not only in degree.

Traditions use it differently

Whether the New Testament word carries the sense of appeasing wrath, or only of cleansing sin, has been argued since the mid twentieth century. Most evangelical translations use propitiation; several mainline ones use expiation or a phrase.

Traditions use it differently

Catholic doctrine. Orthodoxy holds a different and less defined account of prayer for the dead. Protestant traditions reject it, and the sale of indulgences connected to it was the immediate trigger of the Reformation.

Traditions use it differently

That believers meet the Lord is common ground. Whether that is a distinct event before a tribulation, as dispensational teaching holds, or another way of describing the second coming itself, as most other traditions hold, is the disagreement. The distinct pre-tribulation version dates from the nineteenth century.

Traditions use it differently

Catholic teaching: transubstantiation, the substance changes while the appearances remain. Orthodoxy affirms the change and generally declines to explain the mechanism. Lutherans: Christ is truly present in, with, and under the bread and wine. Reformed: a true spiritual feeding on Christ by faith, with Calvin insisting this is no less real for being spiritual. Zwinglian and most Baptist practice: a memorial. This is one of the few places where the Reformation split among itself as sharply as it split from Rome.

Traditions use it differently

Strict Calvinists teach a double decree, election and reprobation. Others hold single predestination, that God elects to save and simply leaves the rest to their choice. Lutherans affirm election and explicitly refuse to teach reprobation.

Traditions use it differently

That the dead will be raised bodily is held by every historic tradition. What is argued is how resurrection relates to the soul: whether the soul is naturally immortal and waits consciously for its body, whether immortality is a gift given at the resurrection rather than a property we already own, or whether the dead rest unconscious until that morning. All three have long Christian histories.

Traditions use it differently

Catholic and Orthodox traditions count seven. Most Protestants count two, baptism and the Lord's Supper, and many prefer the word ordinance to avoid implying that the rite itself conveys grace.

Traditions use it differently

Who is in schism from whom is exactly what the divisions are about, and every side of 1054 and 1517 has an account in which it stayed and the others left. Modern usage has softened: most traditions now speak of separated brethren rather than of heretics, and the Catholic and Orthodox mutual excommunications of 1054 were lifted in 1965.

Traditions use it differently

Some hold that a text means what its author meant, full stop, and that the New Testament writers are drawing typological connections rather than uncovering hidden meanings. Others hold that divine authorship makes a fuller sense possible in principle. The practical stakes are high, since the answer governs whether readers today may find such meanings themselves.

Traditions use it differently

Used freely across the traditions as shorthand. It is worth being precise that this is a later Jewish term adopted into Christian usage, not a biblical title, which matters when someone builds an argument on the word rather than on the passages.

Traditions use it differently

Translators differ on whether to render these words or transliterate them. The King James uses hell for all three, which flattens a real distinction. Most modern translations keep them separate or footnote them.

Traditions use it differently

Widely misunderstood on both sides. The Reformers did not mean Scripture is the only authority, nor that creeds and councils are worthless, and they quoted the Fathers constantly. They meant Scripture is the only infallible norm, to which every other authority answers. The stronger position, that a Christian needs nothing but a Bible, is sometimes distinguished as solo scriptura and was not the Reformation's claim. Catholic and Orthodox critics reply that the canon itself was recognized by the church, so Scripture cannot be self-authenticating.

Traditions use it differently

This is a live argument, and the vocabulary itself is part of it. Classical theology, Catholic, Orthodox, and much of Protestantism, teaches that God creates each soul immortal, so that it survives death consciously and is reunited with a raised body at the end. A second stream holds that immortality belongs to God alone and is given to us at the resurrection, so the soul is not naturally deathless. A third holds that the biblical writers are describing whole persons throughout, and that asking which part of you survives is asking a question the text does not ask. Genesis 2:7 is instructive: the man does not receive a soul, he becomes a living soul.

Traditions use it differently

The label is disputed by nearly everyone it is applied to. Most traditions historically taught some form of it. After the Holocaust, Catholic teaching in Nostra Aetate and much Protestant theology explicitly affirmed that God's covenant with the Jewish people has not been revoked, citing Romans 11:29. Where the argument now sits is over what that means concretely, not over whether antisemitism is compatible with the gospel, which no responsible body now defends.

Traditions use it differently

Orthodoxy makes it the central Easter image: Christ shattering the gates and pulling Adam and Eve out by the wrists, which is what the Resurrection icon actually depicts. Catholic teaching holds he freed the righteous dead. Calvin read it as the cross's anguish. Some Reformed and evangelical churches omit the clause entirely.

Traditions use it differently

Central and non-negotiable in Eastern Orthodoxy. Often misheard in the West as claiming we become gods, which it denies: the distinction between God's essence, which is unknowable, and his energies, which are shared, is the safeguard. Catholic theology has a real equivalent in sanctifying grace and the beatific vision. Protestants have recently rediscovered it, and there is a body of work arguing Luther taught something close to it.

Traditions use it differently

Reformed and Lutheran theology affirm it strongly. Arminian theology also affirms it, then adds prevenient grace, which restores enough freedom to respond. That is the actual difference, and it is smaller than the shouting suggests. Catholic and Orthodox theology describe a wounded rather than wholly incapacitated nature.

Traditions use it differently

Lutherans affirm a real presence without adopting this explanation; Reformed churches hold Christ is present spiritually and received by faith; most Baptists and others hold the meal to be a memorial.

Traditions use it differently

Everyone agrees the New Testament does this. How far a modern reader may extend the practice without inventing connections is genuinely argued.

Traditions use it differently

Traditions weight it differently. Eastern Orthodoxy makes participation in God the whole point and calls it theosis. Calvin made union the organizing idea of his soteriology, which is often forgotten by his heirs. Lutheran theology has worried that emphasizing union can blur the sharp exteriority of justification.

Traditions use it differently

Held by Origen and Gregory of Nyssa in the early church, which is why it cannot be dismissed as modern. The Second Council of Constantinople in 553 condemned a form of it, and Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant teaching have overwhelmingly rejected it since. Modern versions are usually stated as hope rather than certainty, as with Hans Urs von Balthasar, who argued Christians may hope that all are saved without claiming to know it.