Tuesday, August 16, 2016

The neologism of a "personal relationship with Jesus"

(Religion Prof) - I was asked on Reddit about a topic that I blogged about at some point in the past, but not finding the post in question, I thought I would revisit the topic. The phrases “personal relationship with Jesus” and “personal savior” are not only not found in the Bible, but are much more recent than that. Here is what Joel Miller discovered by performing an ngram to see how frequently the phrases appear in books...

Complete article here.

6 comments:

  1. Wrong Way To Evangelize

    Just another way to say, hey, I did that in 2013.

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  2. Actually, a search for this term on my blog turns up nine posts. I wrote them as whatever optimism I had in this sort of Charismatic Catholic thing I was a part of left me.

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  3. at least when they used to use the term 'personal savior', people knew they needed to be saved in some way. Now Jesus is just their buddy.

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    1. I can remember when I was a Baptist in my teens in the 70s hearing the pastor preach and claim that you could tell who was a 'real' Christian by whether they talked about "Jesus" (real) or "Christ" (not real). Even then I knew by the teaching of that selfsame pastor that the NT itself uses both!

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    2. Matushka Donna, its always funny when an idea with a laudable goal (personal active repentence and prayer life to Chrsist) takes on a "language" and externalities, and finally becomes another denomination ...

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