What is Christianity? Can it be defined? What are its boundaries? A standard in-house definition is Trinitarianism, that is, to be a Christian, one must worship the Christian God. You can’t call yourself a Christian if you worship a Unitarian fiction, a Oneness dream, or a Jewish myth. The boundaries of the Christian faith, then, become the Creeds: Apostles’, Nicene, and maybe even Athanasian, if we feel like excluding Byzantines and Baptists. The three questions I opened with seem well and truly answered, at least, until we apply this filter to reality. Romans 10:9 says “if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved,” and yet so many who confess the Lord Jesus and properly identify who He is seem utterly faithless. 1 Timothy 5:8 says “if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” That’s odd: just because I kicked my unmarried daughter out of the house as soon as she turned 18 and I sent Mom and Dad to a nursing home, that doesn’t mean I no longer affirm the Athanasian Creed. How can I be said to have denied the faith?
The Creeds are decent definitions of Christianity for the sake of sociology, but I fear that if we over-rely on belief in some formal definition of the Trinity as the determining factor for who is or is not a Christian, we end up failing to understand what faith actually is. In John 4, the Samaritan woman asked Jesus a very good question. “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship,” she bid. What she was really asking was, “where can the True God be found?” She was attempting to zero in on God, put Him on a map (in this case literally), much like how we define God through the Creeds. Jesus’ reply to her was not to describe the omnipresence of God, or to go into detail on the Trinitarian formula, but rather, He said, “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” To be a Christian, one must worship the Christian God, and since the Christian God is Spirit, those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. The Creeds have us covered as regards truth; we know which, who, and what God we worship, but no mere statement of belief can explain what it means to worship God in spirit.
Properly, it is impossible to worship God in truth without spirit, or in spirit without truth, but I’m going to treat them like they are separable because it helps me make my point. The difference between spirit and truth as regards worship is, as it were, the difference between the heart and the head. Many worship God in truth—that is, they confess all the correct facts, they know all their history, the know the difference between the economic and immanent Trinity, and so on—but they, nevertheless, just aren’t Christians. These are the people, totally inexplicably, seem to always be found on the side of the Devil whenever it matters. In their day-to-day lives, they seem pious and well-mannered, but when given the opportunity to murder their neighbor, whether by knife or by well-placed rumor, their feet are quick to run to mischief, and their hands glad to shed innocent blood. They are beloved pastors, who faithfully preach the word day-in and day-out, yet shamelessly commit adultery, or unspeakable abominations with young boys. They might even keep their hands clean from scandalous personal sin, but they always find a way to persecute the elect. Of such people, the Word of God says, “their foot shall slip in due time.” Though they seem to be Christians now, and may seem to be so even until their deaths, they will always be exposed for what they are.
For such people, the Truth is something external, a robe they cover themselves with, rather than something which they take into themselves. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are historical facts which they accept just like any other, but have no greater significance to them than the conquests of Alexander the Great; world-shaping, but in no way seriously compelling. Jesus says, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.” Some false believers are clever enough to ape the beliefs of true Christians, and make themselves seem like followers of Christ, but many can be spotted by their own failure to recognize Christ’s voice. It is one thing to wrestle with a hard saying, or to not understand what God meant through one Scripture or another; but to ignore a passage entirely, as so many in the American Church are wont to do, is a clear sign that someone is simply faithless. It’s fine to say, “I do not understand,” or even “I believe, yet Lord, you must help my unbelief,” but when a man is confronted with the doctrine of God, exposited clearly from the Scriptures, and says, “I do not agree,” or God forbid, “I do not want to agree,” that man is not a Christian.
On these ignoramuses, C.F.W. Walther writes, “A person may pretend to be a Christian while in reality he is not. As long as he is in this condition, he is quite content with his knowledge of the mere outlines of the Christian doctrines. Everything beyond that, he says, is for pastors and theologians. To perceive as clearly as possible everything that God has revealed, that is something in which a non-Christian has no interest. However, the moment a person becomes a Christian, there arises in him a keen desire for the doctrine of Christ. Even the most uncultured peasant who is still unconverted is suddenly roused in the moment of his conversion and begins to reflect on God and heaven, salvation and damnation, etc. He becomes occupied with the highest problems of human life.”1
We must sharply distinguish between those who suffer from sin and are confused by theology, and those who sin coldly, with no conflict in themselves, and who find themselves in error, not because they understand something mistakenly, but out of a total apathy and disregard for what is true. To the former, our dear Jesus so lovingly consoles, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened,”2 yet to the latter, He condemns without hope, saying, “I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!”3 It is as St. James says, “if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach, and it will be given to him. But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord.”4 The former need correction, the latter, rebuke. When engaging with a man who has handed himself over to the devil, and now seeks to undermine the Church from within, his own soul should not be your primary concern; a peaceful shepherd does not delight in killing the wolf, but will if it must be done for the safety of the sheep. It would be a disaster to let him take advantage of your soft-speaking and thereby harm those weak in faith; it would be just as great of a disaster to treat those weak in faith with such harshness.
The weak and ignorant are not enemies of God; they are, in fact, the very field that God has sent his laborers out to harvest. The enemies of God are the obstinate false teachers, pretend believers, and hard-hearted persecutors. These should be broken upon a stone; the former should be given a soft place to lie down their weary, weary minds. I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of one who has gotten the matter confused, to be lamb mistaken for a wolf. The brutal tongue-lashings are more harmful than we realize, especially when we become accustomed to dishing them out rather than receiving. It is in no way helpful for a fresh believer, who has not yet even learned to tell the voice of his sinful desires from the voice of his reborn conscience, to listen to a Paul Washer sermon about how it’s possible to deceive yourself into believing that you’re saved. You absolutely can; I’ve made that very same point in this very article, but presenting this truth without tact causes nothing but fear and inspires no confidence in Jesus Christ. Christ Himself, in the Sermon on the Mount, perhaps the most difficult and strange of all His sayings in the Scriptures, begins, not with a sharp rebuke of false believers, but with the tender beatitudes, as if to say, “I am going to say many confusing and harsh things. These things will distress you, they will baffle you, and they might cause you to fear. But fear not, for I promise you that those of humble hearts, those who are willing to accept correction, those who seek wisdom earnestly, those who are poor in spirit; these will not be condemned, but rather will find the meaning of my strange words, and will find nothing less than eternal life in them.”
Compare, if you will, the difference between how Christ spoke to scribes and Pharisees, as opposed to how he spoke to the whores and publicans. To the tax collector, He said, “follow me,”5 and to an adulterous woman, He said, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more,” yet to the scribes and Pharisees, He said, “woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!”6 For the whore is sinner, but is merely a sinner. She is lost, in need of redemption, in need of hope. The Pharisee is far worse than the whore, for he is not merely a sinner, but an apostle of sin, a child of Hell. The whore entices a man to fornication, and thus drags him into sin, but the Pharisee prevents—if he can—the whore or the whoremonger from ever finding relief from the burden of their sin, though they seek it earnestly. It is the spirit of the Pharisee which sees the babe in the faith, confused, babbling about with the typical falsehoods of the unlearned, and strikes him so severely, as to terrify him out of the faith altogether—if such a thing were possible.
These, O Christ, these! — may their lying, murdering mouths be forever silenced, their conscience-binding egos forever burned, forever reduced to the most pitiful of ashes. Those who would pervert your Gospel, who would seek to prevent any wretched soul from finding salvation, those who dare to attempt to frustrate your election: may their children lament to have been born of such inauspicious seed, may such be the shame that you bring upon them be. But those, O Christ, those, who are lost, chained to sin, chafing under the harsh driving of the Devil, who are indeed sinners, who indeed are prideful, full of greed and wrath and lust, yet nonetheless should be contrite at the pronouncement of Your Law, happy to hear the sweet joys of Your Gospel: may nothing keep them from finding what they seek, and may they find it swiftly, that goodness and mercy might follow them all the days of their life, and that they might dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Law and Gospel, Second Evening Lecture
Matthew 7:7-8
Matthew 7:23
James 1:5-7
Mark 2:14
Matthew 23:29
The only problem I had while reading this was that I could only like it once. Wow, really good reflections on true faith. Thank you, God bless!