IB World Religions 3.4.1. Where the Doctrines Came From: Commandments, Beatitudes, Paul and the Councils Notes

3.4.1. Where the Doctrines Came From: Commandments, Beatitudes, Paul and the Councils

The Ten Commandments

1. Christian doctrine begins in material Christians share with Judaism. The Ten Commandments, also called the Decalogue, appear twice in the Old Testament, in Exodus 20 and again in Deuteronomy 5.
2. Christians read them as falling into two groups. The first commandments set out what is owed to God, and the rest set out what is owed to other people, a division often described as the two tables of the law.
3. Jesus is presented as assuming them rather than replacing them. When a rich man asks him about eternal life he answers by listing commandments from the second table.
4. The Decalogue became the backbone of Christian moral teaching. It structures the catechisms of the Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed churches, and children in many traditions still learn it by heart.
5. Denominations number the commandments differently, which is why lists in different Bibles and catechisms do not always match.
6. Christians differ over how far the rest of Israel's law binds them. Most distinguish the moral law, which they hold continues, from ritual and civil laws given to Israel, which they hold do not.

The teaching of Jesus

1. The largest source of Christian doctrine is what the Gospels record Jesus as teaching. Matthew 5 to 7, the Sermon on the Mount, is the fullest single block of it.
2. The sermon opens with the Beatitudes, a series of sayings beginning blessed are, which praise the poor in spirit, the mourning, the meek, the merciful and those persecuted for righteousness.
3. Luke gives a shorter version with a sharper edge. His four blessings on the poor and hungry are matched by four warnings addressed to the rich and comfortable.
4. Jesus then intensifies commandments rather than relaxing them, saying that anger stands under the same judgement as murder and that lust already breaks the command against adultery.
5. Asked which commandment is greatest, he joins two verses from the Old Testament: love God with all your heart, and love your neighbour as yourself. Christians call these the two great commandments.
6. Matthew 25 supplies the other pillar. The judgement scene in which people are received or refused according to how they fed the hungry and visited the prisoner underlies the Christian tradition of works of mercy.

The Lord's Prayer

1. The Lord's Prayer is the one prayer the Gospels present Jesus as teaching directly. Matthew gives the familiar longer form, and Luke a shorter one.
2. Its petitions carry a great deal of doctrine in little space. They address God as Father, ask for the coming of his kingdom, for daily bread, for forgiveness, and for rescue from evil.
3. One petition ties belief to conduct. Christians ask forgiveness in the same measure that they forgive others, and Matthew adds a comment underlining the condition.
4. The early Church treated it as a summary of the faith. Tertullian described it as an epitome of the whole gospel, and Cyprian and Augustine wrote whole commentaries on it.
5. It became a teaching tool. Catholic, Lutheran and Anglican catechisms are built around three things to be learned: the Commandments, the Creed and this prayer.
6. It is also the most widely shared act of Christian worship. Catholics pray it at every Mass, Orthodox at the Divine Liturgy, and Protestant services almost always include it, though the closing doxology beginning for thine is the kingdom is used differently across the traditions.

Paul and the apostolic letters

1. The letters of Paul are the earliest surviving Christian writings, composed roughly twenty years after the crucifixion and before any of the Gospels reached their final form.
2. Paul supplied vocabulary that later doctrine could not do without. Justification, grace, redemption, the body of Christ and life in the Spirit all take their standard Christian sense from his letters.
3. His central claim, argued in Romans and Galatians, is that people are put right with God through faith in Christ rather than through works of the law. Luther's rediscovery of that argument set the Reformation moving.
4. 1 Corinthians 15 gives the earliest written account of the resurrection appearances, and Paul treats the Resurrection as the point on which the whole faith stands or falls.
5. Philippians 2 preserves what is probably an early hymn, describing Christ as emptying himself and taking the form of a servant. Later doctrine about the Incarnation drew on it heavily.
6. The New Testament preserves disagreement rather than a single voice. The letter of James insists that faith without works is dead, and Christians have argued ever since about how to hold the two together.

The ecumenical councils

1. When disputes could not be settled locally, bishops met to decide them. A council recognized as speaking for the whole Church is called an ecumenical council.
2. The first met at Nicaea in 325 to answer Arius, who taught that the Son was a creature, and it produced the term homoousios, of one substance with the Father.
3. Later councils answered later questions. Constantinople in 381 completed the creed's article on the Holy Spirit, Ephesus in 431 confirmed the title Theotokos for Mary, and Chalcedon in 451 defined how divinity and humanity are joined in Christ.
4. Councils worked by responding to controversy. They rarely invented vocabulary for its own sake, and their definitions were usually drawn to exclude a position the bishops judged mistaken.
5. Traditions count them differently. Orthodox churches recognize seven, ending with the second council of Nicaea in 787, while Catholics count twenty-one including Trent and the two Vatican councils, and the Oriental Orthodox churches accept the first three.
6. Most Protestants accept the doctrine of the early councils while denying that councils hold authority independently of Scripture, which they regard as the standard by which councils are judged.

Bulls, encyclicals and confessions

1. Doctrine continued to be stated after the early councils, and the documents used differ by denomination.
2. A papal bull is a formal letter named after the lead seal attached to it. Two of them defined Catholic teaching about Mary, the Immaculate Conception in 1854 and the Assumption in 1950.
3. An encyclical is a circulating letter from a pope to the Church, usually applying doctrine to a current question rather than defining new dogma.
4. Their range shows what the form is for. Rerum Novarum in 1891 addressed the rights of workers, Humanae Vitae in 1968 addressed contraception, and Laudato Si' in 2015 addressed the environment.
5. Protestants state doctrine in confessions instead. The Augsburg Confession of 1530, the Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles and the Westminster Confession of 1646 each set out what a communion holds.
6. Orthodox churches have issued no comparable body of new definitions. They hold that the councils and the Church Fathers said what needed saying, and treat the texts of the liturgy as a carrier of doctrine.