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Christian Church Research Paper

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“There’s a sign on the wall, but she wants to be sure. Cause you know sometimes words have two meanings” (Stairway to Heaven). There is more than one way to understand this question based on what the words Christian Church mean. If it is taken to mean a local church, it is not uncommon to find churches that take certain texts (e.g., Matt. 28:19) and put them forward as their mission statement (Barram, 44). In such a case, they understand this, from reading Jesus’ words in Matthew, to be the purpose of their church. On the other hand, Christian Church could be taken to be the Universal Church, in which case, there is no easy answer. In the matter of this paper, the latter will be assumed, and therefore that will be the focus. Though, that focus will not aid in a collective answer, because of the diverse opinions within the Universal Church. For example, Christians share memes on social media supporting public displays of the Ten …show more content…
Adding to that is our Western individualism that insists we can interpret the Bible for ourselves (Ibid. 352). To be sure, another issue that arises is what is meant by the Bible being the Word of God? One of the tests for inclusion in the New Testament (N.T.) cannon was whether the text was written by an Apostle or their associates (Houdmann, Kindle location 40). However, some raise questions as to Pauline authorship of particular texts (Barram, 51). If they were to argue the texts should remain scripture, that would be special pleading and inconsistent with Church history because several texts were excluded for being pseudepigrapha (Norman L. Geisler and William E Nix, Kindle location 2141). At the same time, if Pauline authorship cannot be questioned, that could be understood as an appeal to

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