Is this a “no true Scotsman” situation? When I became and was baptised as a Christian, what made me so was acceptance of Jesus’ teachings
Is this true? Did you at the time think that Jesus had performed miracles, or died and been resurrected? More to the point, whether you had or not, and if you hadn’t, and had told the people who were baptizing you that you hadn’t, would they have gone through with the baptism?
Is this a “no true Scotsman” situation?
Not really. There’s a problem here that some terms have fuzzy boundaries and yet come with all sorts of connotative baggage. In the case of “Christian” the boundaries are somewhat blurry, but when one self-identifies as Christian one is triggering a whole host of connotations and emotional, tribal aspects, whether or not one hits a standard definition of the term.
To use a slightly more extreme example, if I started calling myself Christian, simply because I like some aspects of Jesus’s teachings, and yet don’t believe in any supernatural connection to Jesus, and have never been baptized, and semi-regularly go to Jewish services and no Christian ones, one would probably see something at best confusing about this choice. Thinking about this in terms of some abstraction like bleggs might help.
Is this true? Did you at the time think that Jesus had performed miracles, or died and been resurrected? More to the point, whether you had or not, and if you hadn’t, and had told the people who were baptizing you that you hadn’t, would they have gone through with the baptism?
Not really. There’s a problem here that some terms have fuzzy boundaries and yet come with all sorts of connotative baggage. In the case of “Christian” the boundaries are somewhat blurry, but when one self-identifies as Christian one is triggering a whole host of connotations and emotional, tribal aspects, whether or not one hits a standard definition of the term.
To use a slightly more extreme example, if I started calling myself Christian, simply because I like some aspects of Jesus’s teachings, and yet don’t believe in any supernatural connection to Jesus, and have never been baptized, and semi-regularly go to Jewish services and no Christian ones, one would probably see something at best confusing about this choice. Thinking about this in terms of some abstraction like bleggs might help.