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Is Christianity polytheistic?
- Thread starter Remté
- Start date
It has a lot to do with politics and war. Its necessary to clarify some things that have happened. Christianity presumes that there is harmony of all things, so that even if there could be beings other than humans they will all still be part of some large harmonious existence within God. This harmony is everywhere including in politics or should be. It also assumes God is omnipresent, so no gods control events. We view political problems as rooted in selfishness and pride. There is no Hera arguing with Bela in the sky that explains political infractions. I think one very important part of this is that gods should not be used as excuses for reckless political actions, which often they have been in History.
It turns out, however, that people can still use gods as excuses if they simply try to define God to be something more local and in favor of one party or another. IF group A wants political action and claims God is in their own favor in order to get people to join them against some other people in group B it is essentially a return to rule of gods and a departure from Christianity and is I think idolatry for that reason plus perhaps other reasons. The wars of the Reformation are I think quite idolatrous and political on both sides. There is plenty of non Christian stuff going on down through History, really a serious diversion from what Christianity is supposed to be. You see that wars fought by people who believe in God or who confess God necessarily pit God against God, and that is idolatrous in the Christian sense. An example is WWII in which Christians are forced to fight against other Christians. This should not occur, and it is a form of idolatry. When it occurs all involved are affected and return at least partially to polytheism, because they use God as part of their reasons for the fighting. Even if the war is considered 'Secular' it can't literally be secular, since God is in all things.
Ellen Brown
Well-Known Member
Through a deep lack of cultural understanding that Muslims seem unable and unwilling to remedy, it would seem that they think that Christians believe in more than one God.
Firemorphic
Activist Membrane
Jumi
Well-Known Member
It depends which type of Christianity were looking at. Religions that believe there is a Satan that can be in some form active in the world, sabotaging God's work then I'd say they're practically polytheistic (henotheistic to be exact).
Lol i might call it polytheistic with a single name. I don't see much difference between say one generation worshiping Odin or Zeus, and the next generation worshipping god. More of a consolidation more than anything. Although i might say modern science is definitely polytheistic without the human aspects of emotions. The god, gravity and the god law of physics, and the god relatvity and the god of absolute constants and the god math blah de blah blah is just boring reductive mechanicalism but great stuff for making things. Infact many proclaim validity for the superiority of these gods by the things made because of our understanding of these gods!!! Lol..... Gearheads a dull bunch......
Remté
Active Member
Zeus was God, no? I take it you are an atheist?
Remté
Active Member
What's the reason?
Augustus
…
With the trinity, and often the veneration of Mary and saints who have differing spheres of influence, it can pretty much be functionally polytheistic.
I'll leave it to Christians to decide for themselves though, as unless you are one of these people who fetishises monotheism it makes little difference either way.
I'll leave it to Christians to decide for themselves though, as unless you are one of these people who fetishises monotheism it makes little difference either way.
I admit that in practicing Catholicism I have had this thought more than once. Although Catholicism does emphasize that the intersession of the saints and angelic powers is never independent of the will of God. The saints are not independent deities that can be appeased on their own terms.
It depends on whether or not one sees the veneration of saints as being in conflict with monotheism. I don't, so long as there remains a clear demarcation between veneration and worship.
To my knowledge even Islam maintained such traditions (the veneration of saints) at least until Wahhabism became a thing.
Jumi
Well-Known Member
Outside of Catholicism there are many who don't even do those and can even see them as heresy. At least in mainstream Protestant churches that I know of, there is no place for them.
All strains of Orthodoxy and well as Lutheranism and Anglicanism (at least in the high church form) venerate or at least recognize the saints. It's an age old practice that goes back to the earliest days of Christianity. I know one man's heresy is another's orthodoxy, but if we accept the weight of history then the heresy is on the 'mainstream Protestant' end of things.
Jumi
Well-Known Member
I'm not going to argue for either Catholic or Protestant side of things. Lutheranism where I live didn't teach anything about saints, except that they were things Catholics believed in. Mary was just in the story, nothing more.
The Trinity is not, in terms of ontology, polytheistic. The dogma makes clear that the Godhead is singular in Essence and Being.
It is monotheism for this reason and not Tritheism. The divine essence is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. The divine essence is not the sum of these three persons; it is what each of the persons is, and what all three are in substance.
That said, it is not a strict unitarian monotheism of the kind espoused by Second Temple Jews following return from the Babylonian exile (prior to which, ancient Israelite religion appears to have been henotheistic rather than monotheistic) or more prominently by Muslims.
Functionally, as @Augustus rightly noted, Trinitarian worship bears similarities to at least some forms of polytheistic worship, most notably Hindu Advaita in the sense that there are three distinct Persons (and they really are distinct, subsisting within the inner life of God in distinction relationally) which are in relationship with each other eternally within the Godhead (we call this the doctrine of Perichoresis), despite being in ontic terms one Being (i.e. like Atman). The Hindu idea extends this further by applying it to the universe and all beings as a whole (i.e. "Self" being at the heart of everything, behind maya) whereas Christianity doesn't.
I can pray to and offer worshipful adoration of Jesus, or the Father, or the Holy Spirit or all of them collectively as the Triune Godhead. When I do so, I know that I am worshipping the same God (through the doctrine of the mutual indwelling of the Persons), whether incarnate in human form as Christ or transcendent as the Father or immanent as the Holy Spirit in the temple of my body and soul. And yet, I really am worshipping distinct intra-relational individualities sharing the one nature, essence, being and will. The Holy Spirit is experienced subjectively by me as Comforter, Advocate and bearer of the seven gifts (wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord), whereas the Son and the Father are experienced or rather worshipped with something different in mind, for instance the crucified saviour in fleshly body and the Almighty Father without origin.
Each Person of the Trinity fully possesses all divine attributes, however expresses them distinctly in the sense that to each Divine Person belongs something we cannot attribute to the other two Divine Persons because they are distinct in origin (because the Father begets, the Son is begotten and the Spirit 'proceeds' from the uncreated love between these two, and this is an eternal and continuous inner life of God).
As the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains:
Catechism of the Catholic Church - The Father
When you factor in Catholic-Orthodox-Anglican veneration of Mary as Theotokos (Mother of God, Queen of Heaven), prayers to the Communion of glorified saints and veneration of angels as intercessors along with the dead, in tandem with statues and other things like the sacrifice of the Mass which more traditional Abrahamic faiths would deem idolatry, Christianity is a very peculiar branch of the Abrahamic and monotheist family - even though Sufi Islam shares in a few of these pecularities (although not the statue veneration or the Mother of God). No doubt about it.
The idea that God the Son - one of the Divine Persons of the Godhead - has assumed human nature in the form of a Jewish peasant carpenter and political prisoner executed as a revolutionary criminal under the Roman Empire...and that this is supposed to be the perfect human...well, that is the strangest and to my most compelling peculiarity of all, since it is majestically subversive.
It is monotheism for this reason and not Tritheism. The divine essence is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. The divine essence is not the sum of these three persons; it is what each of the persons is, and what all three are in substance.
That said, it is not a strict unitarian monotheism of the kind espoused by Second Temple Jews following return from the Babylonian exile (prior to which, ancient Israelite religion appears to have been henotheistic rather than monotheistic) or more prominently by Muslims.
Functionally, as @Augustus rightly noted, Trinitarian worship bears similarities to at least some forms of polytheistic worship, most notably Hindu Advaita in the sense that there are three distinct Persons (and they really are distinct, subsisting within the inner life of God in distinction relationally) which are in relationship with each other eternally within the Godhead (we call this the doctrine of Perichoresis), despite being in ontic terms one Being (i.e. like Atman). The Hindu idea extends this further by applying it to the universe and all beings as a whole (i.e. "Self" being at the heart of everything, behind maya) whereas Christianity doesn't.
I can pray to and offer worshipful adoration of Jesus, or the Father, or the Holy Spirit or all of them collectively as the Triune Godhead. When I do so, I know that I am worshipping the same God (through the doctrine of the mutual indwelling of the Persons), whether incarnate in human form as Christ or transcendent as the Father or immanent as the Holy Spirit in the temple of my body and soul. And yet, I really am worshipping distinct intra-relational individualities sharing the one nature, essence, being and will. The Holy Spirit is experienced subjectively by me as Comforter, Advocate and bearer of the seven gifts (wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord), whereas the Son and the Father are experienced or rather worshipped with something different in mind, for instance the crucified saviour in fleshly body and the Almighty Father without origin.
Each Person of the Trinity fully possesses all divine attributes, however expresses them distinctly in the sense that to each Divine Person belongs something we cannot attribute to the other two Divine Persons because they are distinct in origin (because the Father begets, the Son is begotten and the Spirit 'proceeds' from the uncreated love between these two, and this is an eternal and continuous inner life of God).
As the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains:
Catechism of the Catholic Church - The Father
Because it does not divide the divine unity, the real distinction of the persons from one another resides solely in the relationships which relate them to one another...
For as the Trinity has only one and the same natures so too does it have only one and the same operation: "The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not three principles of creation but one principle."97 However, each divine person performs the common work according to his unique personal property. Thus the Church confesses, following the New Testament, "one God and Father from whom all things are, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things are, and one Holy Spirit in whom all things are".98 It is above all the divine missions of the Son's Incarnation and the gift of the Holy Spirit that show forth the properties of the divine persons.
259 Being a work at once common and personal, the whole divine economy makes known both what is proper to the divine persons, and their one divine nature. Hence the whole Christian life is a communion with each of the divine persons, without in any way separating them.
For as the Trinity has only one and the same natures so too does it have only one and the same operation: "The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not three principles of creation but one principle."97 However, each divine person performs the common work according to his unique personal property. Thus the Church confesses, following the New Testament, "one God and Father from whom all things are, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things are, and one Holy Spirit in whom all things are".98 It is above all the divine missions of the Son's Incarnation and the gift of the Holy Spirit that show forth the properties of the divine persons.
259 Being a work at once common and personal, the whole divine economy makes known both what is proper to the divine persons, and their one divine nature. Hence the whole Christian life is a communion with each of the divine persons, without in any way separating them.
When you factor in Catholic-Orthodox-Anglican veneration of Mary as Theotokos (Mother of God, Queen of Heaven), prayers to the Communion of glorified saints and veneration of angels as intercessors along with the dead, in tandem with statues and other things like the sacrifice of the Mass which more traditional Abrahamic faiths would deem idolatry, Christianity is a very peculiar branch of the Abrahamic and monotheist family - even though Sufi Islam shares in a few of these pecularities (although not the statue veneration or the Mother of God). No doubt about it.
The idea that God the Son - one of the Divine Persons of the Godhead - has assumed human nature in the form of a Jewish peasant carpenter and political prisoner executed as a revolutionary criminal under the Roman Empire...and that this is supposed to be the perfect human...well, that is the strangest and to my most compelling peculiarity of all, since it is majestically subversive.
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No i pretty clearly state monitheism is extremely Zeus Odin polytheism with a new name is all and not much more. Ocxasionally some sanity speaks but hey no one cares for that. Now do they.
dianaiad
Well-Known Member
Muslims and modern Jews worship only one God. They believe only One God exists.
Christianity has a bit of a problem with that, Trinitarianism and all that.
Don't get me wrong here; I'm a Christian. I just don't have a problem with God the Father, His Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost all being 'God,' but not being the same Person. I think that may make me 'polytheistic' in comparison to Jews and Muslims...and anybody else who honestly believes that there is only One God and doesn't have to do some maypole twisting to make three into one.
Truth is more important than the name one applies to it. Both Judaism and Islam have a lot of truth to them...not as much as I do, of course, (if I thought they did I'd BE either a Jew or a Muslim)...but a considerable amount, and one of the truths they have is that they are monotheistic and Christians aren't. Quite.
It depends on which branch of Christianity (Denominations) being discussed. Lutheran(s), most certainly Monotheistic. Catholics on the other hand are very polytheistic, whether some can admit it or not.
But I could be biased because I got my start in Catholicism and my wife is a Lutheran, lol.
Samantha Rinne
Resident Genderfluid Writer/Artist
Then they are misunderstandings the Trinity.
God (pictured center), is a single God. These other things are distinct facets.
The Holy Spirit gives all things souls, or life. All living things have the Holy Spirit in them.
The Father creates everything you see, from objects, to the bodies of living things.
And the Son exists as a distinct person of God, the means by which humans can approach God.
If you're paying attention, this doesn't leave much of anything not God. And this is consistent with Judaism, but for the fact that they regard God as behind a curtain, yet humans are in the Image of God. "PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN." Yeah , the Wizard of Oz was an intentional remark about the Jewish tradition of having a curtain in their Temple.
What it isn't comparible with, is Islam, which sees humans as a wholly distinct thing from their god. They reject all notions of apotheosis, preferring to see a deity that is inscrutable and so far beyond humans (which are just sperm, dust, and water) that they can't have a real relationship. If humans were just this, couldn't we make our own?