It is this continuation, a rather strong historical record of interconnected people, sharing the same beliefs, practicing their religion together, and how it all gets traced back to Jesus Himself; with those writings which make up the New Testament at the core of this, that is a central historical center for historic, traditional, mainstream Christianity--even though modern Christians are divided into different denominations, branches, or groups (Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, etc) this same historical core of Christianity remains the chief common denominator among us. Which is why we are confident that in our core confession of religious faith, what we believe, teach, preach, and practice comes directly from Jesus, and is the religion of Jesus first disciples and followers.
3. If prophets like Abraham and Moses were sent by God, what was their purpose if not to bring the message of God, if God had previously only ever sent messengers why can’t Jesus be a messenger too?
We wouldn't exactly say Abraham wasn't a prophet. But we don't generally talk about Abraham as a prophet, instead we refer to Abraham as a patriarch. We don't believe Abraham came with a message from God, but rather that God came to Abraham and made promises to Abraham. It's those promises to Abraham that are important in Christianity.
Those promises include the promise of God establishing a nation of people, fulfilled when Moses was chosen to be God's messenger or prophet to the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, to deliver them and fulfill God's promise to Abraham. To be taken into the land of promise (Canaan) and receive God's instructions on what it meant to be His people (the Torah). God did this, He rescued the Jews from slavery in Egypt, made a covenant promise with them at Mt. Horeb in the Sinai desert, and gave them the instructions which they were to observe (Torah). The Torah was not a universal message for all mankind, but the instructions for the Jewish people as part of the covenant God made with them in Sinai.
But for Christians there is a much more important promise and aspect of these promises, which we believe are fulfilled in Jesus, the Messiah. And that the deliverance of the Hebrew slaves and the giving of the Torah served ultimately to lead the way for the coming of Jesus. And thus Jesus is not a messenger from God, Jesus is actually Himself God's Message.
The Prophets of old came with messages from God, they came speaking "Thus saith the Lord", they came with warnings to turn away from evil and toward repentance; but they also came with promises from God about how God would ultimately bring redemption and healing to the world. This, Christians believe, is the promise of the Messiah, that the Messiah would come and bring this redemption and deliverance to the whole world--and Jesus is the Messiah, the promised Redeemer and Deliverer, the Savior, of the whole world. Jesus did not come with another message, Jesus
is the Message.
The promise of Jesus, Christians believe, can be seen from the beginning, even right when Adam and Eve rebelled in the Garden of Eden and God promises that from Eve would come Someone who would crush the serpent. We see it in the story of Noah, where the flood did not solve the problem of human sin (the story unfolds with Noah cursing Ham's son) and in the promise of how God would never flood the earth again (Christians see in this story a number of elements, such as the ark Noah built rescuing them from the flood becomes a foreshadowing of the salvation which Jesus brings to the world). To Abraham the promise that he would be the father of many nations and through him all nations would be blessed is fulfilled in Jesus, in whom all tribes and nations and peoples are united together as a new people (the Church). To Moses, and all the Prophets, all the way to John the Baptist.
It's all about Jesus.
So Jesus isn't another messenger, or another prophet in a long line of prophets bringing a message from God to people about how they need to follow the right way and depart from sin. Jesus is the Message about which all the Prophets before Him spoke, He is the whole point of everything that happens in the Bible. Jesus is the centerpiece of all human history.
In Christianity, we don't believe God's Message and Revelation is a text or a sermon, but a Person. It's Jesus. The Bible is not God's Revelation, with a capital 'R'. The Bible is what witnesses God's Revelation, because it testifies and bears witness to Jesus.
4. How does hellfire and heaven work in Christianity?
That's a gigantic question with difficult and not entirely clear answers.
There's no definitive consensus about Hell in Christianity. There are different views and different ideas. So on the one hand some Christians believe that Hell is a literal place of eternal torment where unbelievers and evil people go and it's literal fire and literal brimstone and all that. This view is pretty uncommon though and tends to exist only among certain Protestant Fundamentalists. On the other hand, many Christians would say Hell is not a place at all, but instead the state or disposition of the soul which is sinful and at odds with God. The 7th century Christian writer St. Isaac the Syrian writes that hell is what happens when people experience the love of God in eternity but who feel nothing but bitterness and regret. Retired Anglican bishop and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright argues that hell is what it looks like when human beings progressively reach a state of dehumanization, which is how N.T. Wright understands the idea of "the second death" as described in St. John's Apocalypse (aka the Book of the Revelation, the final book of the New Testament).
What all ideas about hell have in common, however, is that it is, in essence, what happens when a human person is so thoroughly alienated from enjoying God, and the life of God, that they experience something that is awful and ultimately incomprehensible. Not an annihilation of their existence, but we might say the annihilation of human dignity. The willful and total negation of all the beautiful things that it means to be human and created in the image and likeness of God.
Heaven, on the other hand, is in some ways easier to talk about. Though there tends to be a lot of misunderstanding about it, even among a lot of Christians.
The concept of "Heaven" is two-fold:
1) What happens after we die?
2) What is the ultimate state of the world?
When Christians talk about "going to heaven" after they die, it refers to a statement made by St. Paul in one of his letters, specifically his second letter to the Christians in the city of Corinth. In that letter he somewhat casually says, given the sufferings he has experienced and continues to experience, he considers it preferable to "be apart from the body and present with the Lord". In this sense "heaven" refers to a state of existence between the death of the body and the resurrection of the body at the end of history. Where those who trust in Jesus will be in His presence, experience a state of rest with Him. They will be with God, and in the company of all the departed saints, and the host of angels who dwell in God's presence. It's not a place (or, at least, the vast majority of Christians would never consider it a place in any literal sense) but something outside of our limited finite comprehension--it is an enjoyment of God and His presence, awaiting the Last Day, when Jesus returns, the dead are raised bodily, and God makes all things new.
In the sense of talking about the ultimate state of the world, "heaven" is often used as short hand for when God renews, heals, and redeems all of creation. The Bible uses the language of "new heavens and new earth" to talk about this restoring and healing of creation. Where there is no longer death, or suffering, or disease, or sorrow or grief. Because the old order, the order of sin and death, is totally gone and done away with. And there is a kind of marriage or union between heaven (God's glorious presence) and earth (the physical universe). And here we enjoy God forever, experience the beauty and goodness of God and God's creation, and exist as God always purposed everything to be. It's what everything was all about, it's all of history, and creation summed up, and made new and healed
in and through Jesus.
5. Can you elaborate on the differences between Christian denominations and how they interpret various aspects of the faith?
Not without writing about a dozen full length tomes.
I can offer an incredibly brief overview using history though.
Originally there was just the Church, or the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, as we read in the Nicene Creed. From the time of the Apostles onward, this described mainstream, orthodox Christianity. Christian communities in different places, meeting together for worship, practicing their faith, with bishops/pastors leading these communities in fellowship together. It wasn't all sunshine and roses, there were debates and different theological controversies that popped up. But the central mainstream that emerged under Jesus and His Apostles was a singular communion of Christian believers.
The first real break among Christians happened in the 5th century (specifically 431 AD). I won't get into the whys or the hows, but it resulted in a split between the Assyrian Church (aka the Church of the East) and the rest of Christianity. In the same century (specifically 451 AD), another schism happened, which resulted in several Eastern Church (the Egyptian or Coptic Church, the Syriac Church, the Armenian Church, and the Ethiopian Church more specifically) and the other Churches no longer being in communion and fellowship. We tend to refer to these Churches collectively as the "Oriental Orthodox".
The next big schism was a doozy. Again, the circumstances are very complicated, but the split happened between East and West in the year 1054. Resulting in what we usually refer to as the Roman Catholic Church in the West, and the Eastern Orthodox Church in the East.
So at this point, there are basically four different Churches which all identified as the same Church which Jesus started:
The Roman Catholic Church
The Eastern Orthodox Church
The Oriental Orthodox Churches
The Assyrian Church
In Western Europe, where the Western or Roman Catholic Church dominated, a lot of things happened between the 11th and 16th centuries. But the next big thing to happen was what is called the Protestant Reformation.
This one is huge, because it wasn't a single event, and the term "Protestant Reformation" is actually misleading. Historians actually speak of three "Reformations":
1) The Magisterial Reformation
2) The Radical Reformation
3) The English Reformation
The Magisterial Reformation refers to two reform movements, the first under Martin Luther, who believed in reforming the Catholic Church, and which largely retained much of the norms of Roman Catholic practice. And the second involving several key figures, most notably John Calvin, but also Ulrich Zwingli and John Knox. These three are generally considered the fathers of the Reformed Tradition; whereas Luther's name is attached to the Lutherans. So two major Protestant traditions emerged from the Magisterial Reformation: The Lutheran Tradition and the Reformed Tradition (often known as Calvinism).
The Radical Reformation refers to a bunch of different more "extreme" religious movements that emerged in Western Europe at the time, these groups wanted to go a lot further than what men like Luther or Calvin wanted or were doing. A lot of these groups get lumped together as The Anabaptists, but "Anabaptist" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, because again it's a lot of different movements. However, the term Anabaptist is helpful because one thing a lot of these groups had in common is a belief that baptizing infants and children was wrong, and so they they re-baptized themselves (ana "again" baptist "baptizer"). Many of these groups were violent and ended up quelled by state authorities, but others were pacifist and have actually continued. For example the Mennonites (named after Anabaptist leader Menno Simons) and a splinter group from the Mennonites, known as the Amish.
Finally, the English Rreformation refers to a different sort of thing altogether. As you are from the UK, you are probably familiar with King Henry VIII and his penchant for wanting a male heir and not getting one, so he was all, "I want a divorce" and the Pope said "No". And long story s hort, Henry said, "Fine, I'll be the head of the Church of England, and I'll give myself the right to divorce". Then Catholic and Protestant factions went back and forth until Anglicanism became a kind of both Protestant and Catholic sort of thing.
After the Reformation we continue to see the emergence of new religious movements and groups spring out from among the broadly defined "Protestants". In England we see the Baptists appear, who while superficially resembling the earlier Anabaptists in that they baptized only adult believers, actually emerged as a split from Anglican Calvinists who believed the English Church compromised too much with Catholicism. Likewise, there were the Puritans, who famously made a colony in Massachussets in what is modern day America, but are more famous for starting the English Civil War--they wanted a "pure" English Church that was more strongly Calvinistic.
But there were other English dissenting groups, like the Quakers, the Shakers; the Shakers aren't around anymore, but the Quakers are, they made a colony in America called Pennsylvania. Under people like Charles Wesley, some Anglicans wanted a more rigorous sense of personal holiness, and they became the Methodists.
In the United States alone, during the 19th century, a LOT of new religious groups emerged. The Millerites, named for a Baptist minister by the name of William Miller who predicted Jesus would return in the 1840's eventually became several different groups, the largest of these post-Millerite groups being the Seventh-Day Adventists. The Second Great Awakening, a major religious revival movement in the US of the 1800s resulted in the rise of the first generations of Evangelicals, who made personal conversion and revival experience a big part of their religious practice and identity. Then there were those who believed in even more personal holiness than John Wesley and the Methodists, and they became the various Holiness Churches, one of the largest of these still around is the Church of the Nazarene. From the Holiness Churches emerged the Pentecostal Churches, such as the Assemblies of God, after the Azuza Street Revival of 1906, that emphasized not only personal holiness as a second blessing, but that speaking in tongues was the principle sign of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life.
The Pentecostal groups would give rise to the Charismatic Movement of the mid 20th century, from which groups like Calvary Chapel and the VIneyard would arise. Neo-Evangelicalism emerged in the early-mid 20th century, one of the principle figures of the movement was Billy Graham. Neo-Evangelicalism didn't necessarily result in new denominations so much as it became a force within many established church organizations. But in modern times there are a number of what are called "non-denominttional churches" which are independent congregations which practice Neo-Evangelicalism (today just called Evangelicalism). Then there are also what are called Third Wave Charismatic churches, these tend to be the sorts of Pentecostal or Charismatic churches which place even more emphasis on supernatural healing and power, often they have people who call themselves apostles and prophets in their midst.
(cont in next post)
