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    Simple Guide to Attending Christian Ceremonies: Catholic and Protestant
    Simple Guide to Attending Christian Ceremonies: Catholic and Protestant
    Simple Guide to Attending Christian Ceremonies: Catholic and Protestant
    Ebook110 pages56 minutes

    Simple Guide to Attending Christian Ceremonies: Catholic and Protestant

    By Akasha Lonsdale

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    About this ebook

    In today's multicultural society we are increasingly likely to meet and become friends with people from different religious backgrounds, and to find ourselves attending an unfamiliar ceremony. When this happens, there can be few of us who know exactly what to expect, or are confident about how to behave. This chapter from Do I Kneel or Do I Bow? will tell you everything you need to understand and take part in a Christian ceremony. Armed with this basic information, you will feel relaxed enough to enjoy the occasion, and perhaps inspired to discover more about the spiritual world view of another cultural tradition.

    Access the world's religions with Simple Guides: Religion a series of concise, accessible introductions to faiths around the world. Written by experts in the field, they offer an engaging and sympathetic description of the key concepts, beliefs, and practices of different faiths. Ideal for spiritual seekers and travellers alike, Simple Guides aims to open the doors of perception. Together the books provide a reliable compass to the world's great spiritual traditions, and a point of reference for further exploration and discovery. By offering essential insights into the core values, customs, and beliefs of different societies, they also enable visitors to be aware of the cultural sensibilities of their hosts, and to behave in a way that fosters mutual respect and understanding.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKuperard
    Release dateSep 1, 2011
    ISBN9781857336467
    Simple Guide to Attending Christian Ceremonies: Catholic and Protestant

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      Simple Guide to Attending Christian Ceremonies - Akasha Lonsdale

      Mourning

      WHAT CHRISTIANS BELIEVE

      The Christian concept of God is ‘triune’. The one, righteous, compassionate Creator is revealed in Three Persons, as God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ) and God the Holy Spirit – known as the Holy Trinity. This fundamental doctrine, agreed at the Council of Nicea in AD 325,* is known as the Nicene Creed, and also as the Apostles’ Creed.

      As a living statement of Christian faith, the Creed declares that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was born human, and that his suffering and death by crucifixion (nailing to a wooden cross) redeemed (saved) us from our sins. His resurrection, when he rose from the dead on the third day, instilled hope and gave the promise of eternal life after death. We are able to enter into a relationship with God the Father through the gift of the human incarnation and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, His son, and through the Holy Spirit working within us personally.

      The Crucifixion. Detail from an altarpiece by Andrea Mantegna, 1459.

      The historical Jesus was a Hebrew preacher born into the tribe of Judah and the House of David, the second king of Israel. The word ‘Christ’ comes from the Greek Christos, a translation of the Hebrew Messiah, meaning ‘anointed one’, and Christians believe that he was the Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament who would usher in the final redemption at the end of days. Jesus was born and died a Jew, and it was not until some time after his death that his disciples travelled widely to spread his teachings.

      After waves of persecution and martyrdom, and through the support of the Emperor Constantine, who converted to Christianity in 312, the new Christian religion became respectable, and finally, in 380, the state religion of the Roman Empire. It was then that the apostle Peter, who had taken Jesus’ message to Rome some two hundred years earlier, was posthumously recognised as a saint, the first Bishop of Rome and so the first Pope. For a thousand years all Christians belonged to a united worldwide ‘Catholic’ Church. (Catholic, from the Greek katholikos, means general or universal.)

      SACRED WRITINGS

      The Holy Bible, the Christian holy book, is a complete instruction book for life and for salvation. It consists of two parts: the Jewish Old Testament, which contains the Ten Commandments, the code of moral conduct given to Moses on Mount Sinai, and the New Testament, containing post-crucifixion accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus by those who either knew him or were under the guidance of those who did. Of several New Testament Gospels (Old English godspel, good news) current at the time, only those of the disciples Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were accepted as being canonical, or authoritative religious texts.

      The New Testament was written in Greek in the course of the first century AD; the Old Testament texts were a third-century BC Greek translation from the Hebrew scrolls. Both Testaments were translated into Latin, the language of scholarship in Western Europe, and in the Western Church all prayer was conducted in Latin until the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century.

      Differences between Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianity revolve around the question of spiritual authority and matters of doctrine. The Catholic Church has a single worldwide hierarchical structure of ordained bishops and priests, whose authority is guaranteed by their direct descent through a line of succession from Christ’s apostles. At their head is the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, who is considered

      Christ’s Vicar (representative) on earth and the successor to St Peter. The many different Protestant Churches, broadly speaking, accept only the Bible as the source of revealed truth, believe in the doctrine of ‘justification’ (salvation) by faith alone, rather than through sacraments or personal merit, and in the priesthood of all believers (discarding the need for a priest to represent them before God). Today the Christian ecumenical movement is attempting to bridge this theological gap.

      Bronze statue of St Peter Enthroned in St Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, Rome. One foot is largely worn away by pilgrims kissing it over centuries.

      BRANCHES OF CHRISTIANITY Division

      The early Church was universal. However, the seeds of disunity were sown in AD 330, when Constantine moved his capital from Rome to the Greek city of Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul, in Turkey). This became the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, later known as the Byzantine Empire, and latterly the home of the Orthodox Church (see chapter on Orthodoxy).

      As security within the Empire deteriorated, communication between the Eastern and Western Church Councils became difficult; despite differences in theology and language – Greek in

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