Disputed Statements

Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Denominations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing of Holy Orders

Currently States Historic Episcopate Received Not Required

Called to Common Mission, adopted in 1999 and in force from 2001, requires bishops in the historic succession at the installation of this church's bishops. A minority read that as importing a requirement the confessions deny and organised against it; others read it as an adiaphoron freely adopted. Both readings are still in the church.

Source Encyclopedia of American Religions, J. Gordon Melton tier 2

Everyman, Performance Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Reception

Currently States Twentieth century scholars argued at length over whether the English or the Dutch text came first; the dispute is now generally settled in favor of Dutch priority, with Everyman read as a close translation and adaptation of Petrus Dorlandus's Elckerlijc rather than its source.

Source Elckerlyc, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica editors tier 1

Evil as Privation, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether privation, as Plotinus placed it at the limit of emanation in matter understood as sheer lack of form, answers the problem of evil or merely restates it in different terms; Jaroslav Pelikan's The Christian Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1971) notes the objection has been pressed continuously since the argument was first made.

Source The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Jaroslav Pelikan tier 1

Expiation and Propitiation, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether the hilask- word group in the New Testament means the removal of sin or the turning aside of divine wrath

According To Christianity

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2005) sets out the camps on whether the hilask- word group in the New Testament means the removal of sin or the turning aside of divine wrath. C. H. Dodd argued in the 1930s, examining Septuagint usage where the same word group renders the Hebrew kipper and takes sins, persons or holy places as its grammatical object rather than God, that the New Testament sense is expiation, and that reading God as the object imports a pagan idea of appeasement foreign to the text. Leon Morris replied, examining the same New Testament passages, that divine wrath is a real and frequent subject in both testaments, that the argument of Romans introduces the passage by way of wrath specifically, and that removing propitiation removes something the text itself supplies. A third reading takes hilasterion in Romans as the kapporeth, the cover of the ark from the Septuagint's own translation choice, so that Christ is the place where atonement is made rather than its agent or its object; William Tyndale and Martin Luther both followed this third reading in their own translations. Nothing in the Greek settles the question on philology alone, and the English word a translator chooses tends to follow the doctrine already held rather than determine it.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) tier 1

Expiation and Propitiation, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within the tradition

According To Christianity

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2005) traces how the two readings of the hilask- word group in the New Testament bear directly on rival atonement theories. If the word means expiation, the removal of sin, the models requiring a change in God's own disposition lose their strongest single text, and Christus Victor, recapitulation and moral influence are unaffected by the philological question either way. If it means propitiation, the turning aside of divine wrath, then wrath is genuinely in the biblical account and the penal and satisfaction theories have their central vocabulary underwritten by the text itself. A number of theologians, examining the Greek usage directly, hold that the disjunction is false, since in the text God is presented as the subject supplying the propitiation rather than merely its object, which would make the choice between the two readings less consequential than either camp assumes.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) tier 1

Expiation and Propitiation, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Doctrinal Status Detail

Currently States Two English theological terms translate the same Greek word group, hilasterion and hilasmos, found in Romans 3:25 and 1 John 2:2 and 4:10: to expiate is to deal with the offence, the sin is covered or purged, and to propitiate is to deal with a person, someone is appeased. C. H. Dodd argued in the 1930s that the Septuagint's use of the same Greek group to render the Hebrew kipper, whose objects are sins and holy places rather than God, means the New Testament word should be read as expiation; Leon Morris replied that the wrath of God is a real and frequent subject in both testaments and that removing propitiation removes something Paul's argument in Romans supplies. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd revised edition, Cross and Livingstone, eds., Oxford University Press, 2005) records the exchange as never closed, and English Bible translations themselves have gone both ways, propitiation in the Authorised Version and expiation in the Revised Standard Version.

According To Christianity

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) tier 1

F, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Chaldean Letter Value

Currently States 8

According To Modern planetary numerology, the scheme called Chaldean

The values recorded here follow Cheiro's Book of Numbers (Cheiro, the pen name of William John Warner, published by Herbert Jenkins, London, 1926), the most widely reproduced version of the so-called Chaldean numerology table. Cheiro's own text names no ancient Chaldean source for the letter values it assigns, and comparing it against other published numerology tables from the same and later periods finds no agreement between them on several letters; no Mesopotamian or Chaldean text has ever been produced that contains a comparable letter-number correspondence. That comparison is why historians of the modern occult treat "Chaldean" as a nineteenth and twentieth century marketing label rather than a checkable lineage claim. The value recorded here is Cheiro's published reading, not a settled fact.

Source Cheiro's Book of Numbers, Cheiro (William John Warner) tier 3

Fa Ngum, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Tradition

Currently States That Khmer monks arrived in his train with the Pali canon and the Phra Bang to establish the religion in his kingdom

According To Theravada

George Coedes's The Indianized States of Southeast Asia (University of Hawaii Press, 1968) examines the Lao chronicle tradition crediting Fa Ngum with founding the Lan Xang kingdom and receiving the Phra Bang Buddha image. Coedes's method is comparative, checking the chronicles, compiled from the sixteenth century onward rather than from any contemporary record, against a recognizably similar founding pattern told of several neighbouring Southeast Asian courts, and against art historians' stylistic dating of the Phra Bang image itself to a period later than Fa Ngum's reign. One camp treats the chronicle sequence as substantially reliable in outline; the other reads it as dynastic legitimation projected backward, while both accept that Theravada Buddhism of the Sinhalese ordination line did reach the middle Mekong through court importation in roughly this period.

Source The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, George Coedes tier 1

Fa'afafine, Religious Roles & Titles

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States The religious dimension is the debated question, not the role itself. Pacific ethnographers treat fa'afafine chiefly as a social gender category of Samoan society, and warn that the widely circulated picture of a sacred or ceremonial third gender is a romanticisation assembled largely outside the islands.

Camps exist. Popular writing and some scholarly and activist writing read the Pacific gender liminal roles, fa'afafine among them, as carrying a spiritual or ceremonial standing rooted in the pre-Christian order. Pacific ethnography, including the comparative work collected in Gender on the Edge, treats fa'afafine as a social gender category and finds no documented ceremonial office; the ethnographic weight is against the sacred reading.

Source Gender on the Edge: Transgender, Gay, and Other Pacific Islanders, Niko Besnier and Kalissa Alexeyeff (editors) tier 1

Fabbrica di San Pietro in Vaticano, Custodians & Museums

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Relevant Holding

Currently States Veil of Veronica, kept within one of the four crossing pillars beneath the dome of St Peter's Basilica

The Fabbrica di San Pietro in Vaticano has custodianship of the Veil of Veronica preserved at St Peter's Basilica, a cloth tradition holds bears an image of Christ's face imprinted during his path to crucifixion. The Fabbrica's own published account of the basilica's relics records that Rome's claim to hold the authentic Veronica has long competed with other traditions elsewhere, most notably a cloth venerated at Manoppello in Italy that some scholars and clergy have argued is the true or an equally ancient image. The method available for comparison is documentary and art-historical, tracing each cloth's own attestation history and, where possible, direct visual examination, complicated in Rome's case by the image itself being reported as extremely faint and rarely displayed for close public inspection, which limits independent comparative study. Because neither tradition has been settled by an examination decisive enough to displace the other, and the Roman image's faintness itself constrains what any comparison could establish, the claim to singular authenticity remains debated rather than resolved.

Source The Veronica and the Relics of St Peter's Basilica, Fabbrica di San Pietro in Vaticano tier 2

Fahd of Saudi Arabia, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States What the global distribution programmes did to Sunni Islam

Roel Meijer's edited Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement (Columbia University Press, 2009) examines King Fahd's programme of free worldwide scripture distribution and funding of mosques and Islamic institutes abroad, carried out through his position as Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. Meijer sets out two readings of the same programme: one reads it as custodianship carried out at the scale the religious office implies; the other, examining which specific doctrinal and editorial line the funded material carried, holds that distributing one interpretation at a scale no other body could match shifted the balance of global Sunni practice toward the reading favoured in the Saudi kingdom, at the expense of local schools of law and regional traditions elsewhere. Meijer records the two readings are not mutually exclusive, and both camps agree on the scale and the mechanism of the programme itself.

Source Global Salafism: Islam's New Religious Movement, Roel Meijer (ed.) tier 1

Fahd of Saudi Arabia, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit

Currently States Born at Riyadh in the early 1920s, died 1 August 2005

Encyclopaedia Britannica's online academic reference (Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, 2024 access) records that King Fahd of Saudi Arabia's death date is certain, but that his birth year is not: published reference sources give 1920, 1921 and 1923 variously, because births in the Saudi royal house of that period were not civilly registered, and the differing figures descend from later, non-contemporary statements rather than a birth record. Britannica notes the camps here are reference works rather than individual scholars, but that they hold genuinely different dates on the same absence of documentation, which is why this fact is recorded as debated rather than asserted to a single year.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference), Encyclopaedia Britannica editors tier 2

Fai ϥ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Greek letters wrote Egyptian from about the first century CE, settled by the fourth

According To The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt

The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) surveys the small corpus of Old Coptic texts, pre-Christian magical and astrological papyri in which Egyptian was first written out using Greek letters plus a few signs borrowed from Demotic, against the standardised Coptic used in Christian scripture translation from around the third century CE onward. Comparing the two corpora, its contributors find the evidence thin enough to support two readings: that the Old Coptic magical texts already fixed the practice of writing Egyptian in Greek-based letters, or that the Christian translation project, needing a stable and teachable orthography for scripture, was the decisive act that standardised the script that survives. Because both readings draw on the same handful of surviving texts and no source describes an official act of decision, the volume treats the question as open rather than favouring either camp.

Source The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.) tier 1

Faith, Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Stated by Paul at 1 Corinthians 13, a letter most scholars date to the mid 50s CE during his Ephesus ministry, though the precise year is not fixed. Unlike the cardinal virtues, already current in pagan Greek philosophy centuries earlier, faith's status as a named theological virtue begins with this Pauline text.

Source The Holy Bible, Anonymous (multiple authors) tier 1

Falun Gong, Religions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Adherents Today

Currently States Estimates from the late 1990s, including figures reported by Chinese state bodies before the 1999 ban, ran as high as seventy million practitioners in China; Falun Gong's own claims have run higher still. No independently verified count exists for practice today, in China or worldwide, given the movement's continued suppression there and the absence of any neutral registry abroad.

Pre-ban estimates come from a period when the Chinese state itself had reason to report a large number to justify the scale of its later crackdown, and post-ban figures cannot be independently checked either inside China, where practice is suppressed, or abroad, where no registry exists.

Source The Religion of Falun Gong, Benjamin Penny tier 1

Famen Temple Finger-Bone Relic, Artifacts & Relics

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Date Attributed

Currently States Venerated as the Buddha's finger since the Tang

Robert H. Sharf's academic study The Buddha's Finger Bones at Famensi and the Art of Chinese Esoteric Buddhism (2010) works from the Famen Temple's own Tang dynasty records and imperial court diaries, which securely document the relic's veneration, its ceremonial processions to the capital and its return, from the Tang period onward. Sharf's method is textual and art historical, reading those records and the reliquary's own iconography against the wider practice of relic veneration in Chinese esoteric Buddhism, rather than any physical test of the bone. That documentation settles when and how the relic was treated as sacred; it cannot settle whether the fragment is what the tradition says it is, since no comparable evidence reaches back to the Buddha's own era.

Source The Buddha's Finger Bones at Famensi and the Art of Chinese Esoteric Buddhism (academic study), Robert H. Sharf tier 1

Famen Temple Finger-Bone Relic, Artifacts & Relics

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Date Attributed

Currently States Ultimate origin in the Buddha traditional

Robert H. Sharf's academic study The Buddha's Finger Bones at Famensi and the Art of Chinese Esoteric Buddhism (2010) works from the Famen Temple's own Tang dynasty records and imperial court diaries, which securely document the relic's veneration, its ceremonial processions to the capital and its return, from the Tang period onward. Sharf's method is textual and art historical, reading those records and the reliquary's own iconography against the wider practice of relic veneration in Chinese esoteric Buddhism, rather than any physical test of the bone. That documentation settles when and how the relic was treated as sacred; it cannot settle whether the fragment is what the tradition says it is, since no comparable evidence reaches back to the Buddha's own era.

Source The Buddha's Finger Bones at Famensi and the Art of Chinese Esoteric Buddhism (academic study), Robert H. Sharf tier 1

Fana (the Pursuit of Self-Annihilation), Practices

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States The classical scholar Al-Sarraj warned against a reading of fana that claimed the mystic passes away from their own qualities and comes to enter into the qualities of God, judging that account to risk collapsing into something resembling the Christian doctrine of the incarnation of Jesus. His warning sharpened the line between the moderate reading of fana he shared with Al-Junayd and Al-Ghazali and the unionist reading advocated by Al-Bistami and Al-Hallaj.

Scholars within the Sufi tradition itself have long disagreed over how literally to take this stage of self-annihilation, and this fact records one side of that internal debate rather than the atlas's own position.

Source Fana (Sufism) (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Fangzhongshu, Practices

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Today

Currently States Revived or reconstructed in the modern era

One camp treats the modern presentations as a living transmission; another treats them as twentieth century constructions assembled from published translations. The disagreement is over continuity, not over what the ancient texts say.

Source The Encyclopedia of Taoism, Fabrizio Pregadio (ed.) tier 1

Fangzhongshu, Practices

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Practice Status Detail

Currently States The classical corpus survives as text and is studied as such. Modern systems presented under the name of Daoist sexual cultivation draw on it selectively, and their continuity with the Han and Tang material is disputed.

Fangzhongshu, the classical Chinese literature on the bedchamber arts, survives as a body of text from the Han and Tang periods and is studied by sinologists as historical and medical literature in its own right. The dispute recorded here concerns modern systems that present themselves as Daoist sexual cultivation, teaching methods to practitioners today under that lineage claim: Fabrizio Pregadio's Encyclopedia of Taoism treats these modern systems as drawing selectively on the classical corpus rather than transmitting it whole, borrowing particular techniques or vocabulary while leaving out the surrounding medical and cosmological framework the Han and Tang texts embed them in. Whether a given modern system's practice is a genuine continuation of the classical material or a modern construction assembled from selected classical fragments and presented as older than it is cannot be settled from the classical texts alone, since the texts document only the ancient practice and say nothing about any particular modern claimant's lineage; it would need a documented chain of transmission from named teacher to named teacher, which the modern systems in question have not supplied.

Source The Encyclopedia of Taoism, Fabrizio Pregadio (ed.) tier 1