(April 6, 2017 at 9:28 am)Mister Agenda Wrote: They only need to be in lockstep about things they're claim they are consistent on. If you say cellular biologists agree on X and X isn't settled at all, then you can't really say that agreeing on X is a characteristic of cellular biologists, can you? In fact, there are very few things 90% of Christians agree on, and that's fine, until you start saying things like 'true Christians do or believe X' and it knocks out a significant portion of people who are counted as Christians on the census. It's reasonable to question how representative that 'Christians do this' statement is.
Someone up thread said something to the effect that Christianity is the Bible. That isn't actually the case. Like every other religion, Christianity is the people its composed of. Christians determine what Christianity is, and if they have a big change of heart about something concerning their religion en masse, Christianity changes with them.
I don't think that any of this is the case. The NT is the only source to define what a Christian is. No group of people can get together and decide differently--they would simply be defining a new group. If a group of people want to get together and organize around certain doctrinal differences, practices, cultures, or emphasis that are not otherwise part of the definition, that is reasonable and acceptable. None of these groups claim the others are not Christian until they depart from the basics.
What are the basic? Well that was a question very early on. The Apostle's Creed was written in the first half of the second century.
Regarding your last sentence, do you have any examples of that?
