Monotheistic religion: A religion with only one entity which can be described as a god or godess.
Monotheism: The belief that there exists only one god.
The descriptive and the proscriptive senses you might say. One of them is 'objective' in that it is not about beliefs. The other relies on the adherents belief about the divine.
A person that adheres to monotheism may belong to a religion that another person would describe as polytheistic.
A lot of confusion on this post as people have mixed these things around and talked passed each other.
This is the direction in which I would like this thread to go. An examination of the (possibly) polytheistic roots of Christianity.
Well, the polytheistic roots of Judaism are quite straightforward - but what new stuff do we see in Christianity?
Well there is some influence from Platonism, but I'll just focus on...hell.
The Old Testament simply refers us to the grave as the result of death. But the New Testament refers us to Tartarus and the Lake of Fire.
2 peter 2:4 writes:
For if God messengers who sinned did not spare, but with chains of thick gloom, having cast [them] down to Tartarus, did deliver [them] to judgment, having been reserved,
The Greek concept of a dark place under the earth where one goes to be punished for crimes taken place upon it. It was also where spiritual enemies of the ruling power would be cast into - so it was filled with very bitter possibly wicked gods and other creatures.
How does someone on Mount Olympus cast someone underneath the earth? Via a pit, a deep Abyss.
Revelation 20:1-3 writes:
And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.
And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years,
And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.
It has been said that Etna may have led the Greeks to conclude that the underworld had rivers of fire, they didn't have lakes of the stuff. That said, the Egyptians did have lakes of fire in the Book of the Dead (but there's no record the Greeks had access to that).
Just a few random notes, really, something to kick start the ideas - looking for Greek concepts that weren't in the OT that are in the NT...