As an obvious consequence, obstacles to genuine interfaith communication have grown more formidable in one important area: relations between Christians and non-Christians in these lands.

Although I have emphasized the barriers which an aroused nationalism has raised against relations between Christians and non-Christians in Asia, the fact is that this development has also widened the gulf between certain Afro-Asian religions themselves.

I do not mean to imply that Christians have adopted the liberal assumption, so prevalent in Hinduism, that all religions are merely different paths to the same summit.

Schweitzer found many New Testament references to apparently show that 1st-century Christians believed literally in the imminent fulfillment of the promise of the World's ending, within the lifetime of Jesus's original followers, He noted that in the gospel of Mark, Jesus speaks of a " tribulation ", with his coming in the clouds with great power and glory " ( St Mark ), and states when it will happen: " This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled " ( St Matthew, 24: 34 ) ( or, " have taken place " ( Luke 21: 32 )): " All these things shall come upon this generation " ( Matthew 23: 36 ).

Thus, over the past 1, 500 years, some Christians have used the term Arian to refer to those groups that see themselves as worshiping Jesus Christ or respecting his teachings, but do not hold to the Nicene creed.

Perfected Christians remain subject to temptation, and have continued need to pray for forgiveness and holiness.

Other scholars have even said that Luke wrote this apology in order to support Christians who were becoming allies with local Roman officials.

Thus far the only people who have been attested with a high level of genetic, historical, linguistic and cultural research to be the descendants of the ancient Mesopotamians are the Assyrian Christians of Iraq and its surrounding areas in north west Iran, north east Syria and south eastern Turkey.

All Christians who have a genuine relationship with God through and in Christ are part of the " true Church ", according to exemplary statements of evangelical Protestant theology, notwithstanding condemnation of the Catholic Church by some Protestants.

Some argue that the view of Arianism that exists to this day among most Christians would not have existed were it not for Athanasius.

Bernard Lewis states that the Muslim laity and Islamic authorities have always had great difficulty in accommodating post-Islamic monotheistic religions such as the Bahá ' í Faith, since the followers of such religions cannot be dismissed either as benighted heathens, like the polytheists of Asia and the animists of Africa, nor as outdated precursors, like the Jews and Christians.

Christians have traditionally interpreted it as a prophecy of Jesus as the Christ ( i. e., Messiah ).

Isaiah 52: 13 – 53: 12, the fourth of the " Suffering Servant " songs, was interpreted by the earliest Christians as a prophecy of the death and exaltation of Jesus, a role which Jesus himself seems to have accepted ( Luke 4: 17 – 21 ).

There were not, in antiquity, as there are today, single-volume collections of all of Sacred Scripture which most Christians have in codex form in their homes and places of worship.

For American Christians, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and American Politics notes: " The GSS ... has asked a born-again question on three occasions ... ' Would you say you have been ' born again ' or have had a ' born-again ' experience?

Some Christians, such as Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, also have traditions of fasting, in which saints, as well as Jesus, are claimed to have been able to go for a period of time ( without any food, or with no food but the Eucharist ).

While there have been many theological disputes over the nature of Jesus over the earliest centuries of Christian history, Christians generally believe that Jesus is God incarnate and " true God and true man " ( or both fully divine and fully human ).

In contrast Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Arminian Protestants believe that the exercise of free will is necessary to have faith in Jesus.

Many Christians have believed that Jesus ' doctrine of peace speaks only to personal ethics and is distinct from civil government's duty to punish crime.

As some denominations do not have a hard-line stance on the subject, Christians of such denominations are free to make a personal decision.

These groups, along with other Christians opposed to capital punishment, have cited Christ's Sermon on the Mount ( transcribed in Matthew Chapter 5 – 7 ) and Sermon on the Plain ( transcribed in Luke 6: 17 – 49 ).

There have also been periodic tensions with both mainstream and fundamentalist Christians, who think the religion is aligned with Gnosticism or is a cult, and fault it for departing from traditional Christian doctrine.

In a historical or geopolitical sense the term usually refers collectively to Christian majority countries or countries in which Christianity dominates or was a territorial phenomenon .“ Christendom is originally a medieval concept steadily to have evolved since the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the gradual rise of the Papacy more in religio-temporal implication practically during and after the reign of Charlemagne ; and the concept let itself to be lulled in the minds of the staunch believers to the archetype of a holy religious space inhabited by Christians, blessed by God, the Heavenly Father, ruled by Christ through the Church and protected by the Spirit-body of Christ ; no wonder, this concept, as included the whole of Europe and then the expanding Christian territories on earth, strengthened the roots of Romance of the greatness of Christianity in the world .”

When the Germanic peoples entered the Roman Empire and founded successor-kingdoms in the western part, most had been Arian Christians for more than a century.

In Tabriz, André de Longjumeau met with a monk from the Far East, named Simeon Rabban Ata, who had been put in charge by the Khan of protecting the Christians in the Middle-East.

In the 20th century, there has been more contact between Protestants and Christians from Eastern traditions which claim apostolic succession for their ministry.

Widely accepted among Western Christians, including the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion, the Lutheran Church and most liturgical Protestant denominations, the Athanasian Creed has been used in public worship less and less frequently.

Gladstone, however, saw the issue in moral terms, for Bulgarian Christians had been massacred by the Turks and Gladstone therefore believed it was immoral to support the Ottoman Empire.

Similar to the traditional view in Judaism, conservative Christians view the Book of Daniel as written by the prophet Daniel, who they claim wrote the book around 536 BC after having been in captivity for about 70 years.

This discovery has shed much light on the differences between the two versions ; while it was previously maintained that the Greek Septuagint ( the version used by the earliest Christians ) was only a poor translation, professor Emanuel Tov, senior editor of the Dead Sea Scrolls ' publication, wrote that the Masoretic edition either represents a substantial rewriting of the original Hebrew, or there had previously been two different versions of the text.

The use of the definite article before the word " Christ " and its gradual development into a proper name show the Christians identified the bearer with the promised Messiah of the Jews who fulfilled all the Messianic predictions in a fuller and a higher sense than had been given them by the Rabbis.

Some Christians believe that Biblical passages have been mistranslated or that these passages do not refer to LGBT orientation as currently understood.

Following the lead of Yale scholar John Boswell, it has been argued that a number of Early Christians entered into homosexual relationships, and that certain Biblical figures had homosexual relationships, despite Biblical injunctions against sexual relationships between members of the same sex.

Christians regard the foundational principle of the lifelong union of a man and a woman to have been first articulated biblically in, and reaffirmed by Jesus in and, and by the Apostle Paul in.

Christians teach that human beings inherit a corrupted or damaged human nature in which the tendency to do bad is greater than it would have been otherwise, so much so that human nature would not be capable now of participating in the afterlife with God.

This position has been softened by some adherents, or completely rejected by other churches where Jews are recognized to have a special status due to their covenant with God through Abraham, so this continues to be an area of ongoing dispute among Christians.

Following the Holocaust, attempts have been made to construct a new Jewish-Christian relationship of mutual respect for differences, through the inauguration of the interfaith body the Council of Christians and Jews in 1942 and International Council of Christians and Jews.

The church has been a paramount – and for many Christians the most important – pilgrimage destination since at least the 4th century, as the purported site of the resurrection of Jesus.

Muslim sources say a by-product of the agreement was the recanting of Islam by many Christians who had been forced to convert under Al-Hakim's persecutions.

Paul writes from Ephesus that " Christ our Pascha has been sacrificed for us ," although the Ephesian Christians were not the first to hear that Exodus 12 spoke about the death of Jesus.

The Gregorian calculation of Easter was based on a method devised by the Calabrian doctor Aloysius Lilius ( or Lilio ) for adjusting the epacts of the moon, and has been adopted by almost all Western Christians and by Western countries who celebrate national holidays at Easter.

It thus could have been written anywhere in the Empire where Christians spoke Greek.