It's obviously very difficult to compress any religion's doctrines down into an easily digestible form, but the pamphlets used by the missionaries do a pretty good job of summarizing the most important points [0].
Beyond that, the Gospel Topics[1] section is, as you found, a bit of a rabbit hole, but contains the church's official stance on any topic where they've taken a stance. If you can't find it there, it's likely that there isn't an official consensus.
It explains the sovereignty of God in salvation very well. It is one of the best explanations of Reformed Theology that I've found that is meant for a non-seminary student.
Some of this stuff makes the blood curdle. If it was spewed by some guy in a turban the US would probably have had him killed with robots from the sky by now...
> The core teachings, and canonical status of the bible, is very consistent across the major denominations.
Is it really?
Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism put great emphasis on following the teachings of the Saints and the Church, much more so than trying to understand the religion by yourself. Many strands of Protestantism are the exact opposite.
Many protestants believe that the Church should be an active part of people's lives and guide them in all decisions, while Eastern Orthodoxy believes the Chruch must limit itself to spiritual matters and mostly even avoid things like charity.
Catholics believe that much of the Bible is entirely allegorical and should be interpreted only as such (most notably, Genesis). Many American Protestant traditions believe that everything in the Bible is literally true, leading to Creationism and an opposition to the theory of evolution, and sometimes even to New Earth Creationism.
Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Calvinism, Lutheranism and others believe that the teachings of Jesus and the early Church Fathers make the Old Testament mostly obsolete (especially in regards to dietary and clothing restrictions, the Shabbat, or circumcision), while some Protestant churches hold some or all of these as still part of Christian cannon.
There are many other major differences - the effects of God's favor in this life (leading to ideas like the prosperity gospel in Protestantism), the belief in saintly miracles, the very existence of saints, faith healing, trinitarianism, filioque, fasting, the dates of Christmas and Easter and many others.
Isn't understanding god's rules for it's followers part of theology?
For example, in Catholicism, the Church is supposed to have some level of divinity carried over from Christ. That would make the central authority of the church part of how they understand god, or their theology, so lacking those things would become part of Protestant theology.
The original statement went for "most Christian churches", not "most Christians" (what you'd get with your "weighting"). Maybe a useless metric but the one chosen up-thread.
Going from there to implicitly weighting by membership seems rather arbitrary: I could also claim to weigh by readership (or hours of reading, or any other metric that includes actually working with the text) which might give a pretty different result, given how the idea of individually reading and interpreting the Bible is a major raison d'être of Protestantism.
One would also need to weight the beliefs. Various denominations disagree about topics like predestination, but don't ultimately place a lot of value on those topics. There are often many people in the same denomination who don't necessarily agree with every official bit of low weighted doctrine.
Theology about the nature of Christ has significantly higher weight. Heresy, etc. This is where you see little diversion between denominations and more diversion between, say, Protestants and the LDS Church.
Just one minor note: these are parts of American Protestant fundamentalist Christianity, I don't think similar concepts can be found in even the more fundamentalist factions of Catholic, Orthodox, Calvinist, Lutheran, or Ethiopian Christian sects.
"Everything from preaching to media technology, from helping with funerals to discipling [sic] unbelievers."
This is one of those very frustrating conversations to have online, not that different from people saying "but it's the People's Democratic Republic of whatever."
The Baptist thing called "applied theology" is a part of the Dominionist movement. Fundamentally it's a theocratic endeavor.
I agree that theology has been used in a thousand ways across two thousand years and I'm sad that if you have a degree in "Applied Theology" from a small religious college in the Midwest it's definitely not just "I was thinking of becoming a minister."
But dominionism is a real thing. People major in it, they drop out, they get other jobs, and then you have this record of their beliefs right there on their resumes. It'd be easier if they had no degree at all.
Systematic theology tries very hard to lay out a self coherent view of Christian theology. As much as I think that some of the conclusions it comes to are abhorrent, it is possible to do. American Christianity has a less strong relationship with rationality.
So the author says Weber's claim that protestant theology leads to good work ethic is 'marshmellow soft' without once refuting any actual point Weber makes about said theology. He instead makes the equally vague claim that religious texts can be interpreted in any way. This is naive for two reasons:
1. It implies that theological texts can't give any clearly definable meaning. This means that the Quran and the New Testament are essentially equivalent in terms of their impact on society. He needs to present me more evidence than he did in backing up this very strong claim.
2. It implies that there is a single predominant factor in explaining group behavior. This is a fallacy of the single cause. Sure, group-think plays a part. However, it would be very hasty to say that theology doesn't play a part as well in forming that group-think in the first place.
The Puritans had a view of theology very very different from the Catholics. They believed that their salvation was fundamentally God's choice (Calvinism) instead of their own (Arminianism). You might make the point that this refutes point 1. above, except that this 'theology' didn't come out of thin air, it came from a very literal reading of the New Testament (Romans 8:29-30 for example). This theology - particularly the doctrine of total depravity coupled with predestination - has practical implications on how one would craft the _policy_ of new institutions. This in turn necessarily trickles down into freedoms, human rights, and finally economics. The burden of proof is on the author of this article to explain how this set of beliefs (let alone Weber) are not hugely impactful on traditional western values.
The Athanasian Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon are probably the most relevant, as they deal specifically with Christological questions. The Apostles' and Nicene are valuable, but are too early to have the specifics nailed down just yet. (In historical terms, an Arian or Sabellian would be able to agree with their content without too much equivocation or mental reservation.)
Here is a better jumping off point :
http://www.veritas.org/how-does-christianity-measure-up/
If you want a very in depth treatment, then:
https://www.amazon.com/Doctrine-Knowledge-God-Theology-Lords...
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