Good evening everybody! Welcome back to my blog. This is the place where I write a bunch of stuff down, pretend like people are going to read it and understand that in reality, no one is reading it. The cherry on top of the self-involved sundae that is my blog is that every time I write something I think to myself, “one day I may run for office at some level and have to defend these words.” Clearly, I have delusions of grandeur.
Anyways, I wanted to take some time today to write about something that has been rolling around in my brain for some time. Indeed, I have hinted at this in a couple other blog posts but I have never devoted a whole piece to it.
What I would like to spend some time reflecting on is the tendency for Christians to call out their fellow believers for being “fake Christians,” “Christians in name only,” “Sunday Soldiers,” etc… These are all different ways of suggesting the same thing, namely, that despite the knowledge that there are billions of self-proclaimed Christians in the world (and hundreds of millions in the United States alone), that the “actual” numbers are much lower because many people who call themselves Christians are not, in fact, true believers. Those of you out there with a penchant for philosophy, logic, or neckbeards may quickly recognize this as a classic “no true Scotsman” argument.
For those of you less familiar with how these discussions typically go, let me present a couple quick and simple examples based on real arguments that I have seen/heard play out hundreds of times.
Example 1
Person 1: Christians do not support gay marriage
Person2: I’m Christian, and I support gay marriage.
Person1: No TRUE Christian supports gay marriage
Example 2
Person 1: The Bible is the literal, infallible word of God. It’s 100% accurate both historically and theologically
Person 2: Actually, the Bible was never meant to be a historical textbook, and the people that wrote it were not aware at the time of writing that what they were composing would one day be considered scripture. To understand the Bible properly, you must understand the author’s historical context, audience, and intentions. Expecting the bible to be without error forces you to believe in contradictions. I believe the Bible is the word of God, but I do not believe that that necessitates that I suspend my critical thinking.
Person 1: TRUE Christians believe the Bible is the infallible word of God. Anything below that and you are placing yourself as the arbiter of truth. The Bible is perfect and if you disagree then you may not be actually Christian.
These are two very common, albeit simplified, versions of how conversations like this can go.
So, why do I think this is silly?
All claims of “true Christians do X” or “believe X, Y, and Z” are predicated on the idea that a true form of Christianity can be known and put quite simply, it cannot be. The Bible, like all ancient texts, does not compel its own interpretation. Well-intentioned people have, since the time of Jesus, pored over his words and reached drastically different conclusions about their meaning. Heck, The Bible itself recounts a debate between Peter and Paul, in the pages of Acts and Galatians, about exactly what Jesus taught regarding his follower’s relationship to the law (the first covenant, or the Jewish Old Testament). That was within the first few years after Christ died and involved arguably his two most important apostles. One, in Peter, who knew him in life, and another, in Paul, who reportedly had a postmortem revelation and would eventually become the author of nearly half of the books of the New Testament.
In the years following Christ’s death, groups calling themselves Christian sprung up all across the middle east and northern Africa with wildly differing beliefs. Some groups, like the Marcionites, believed that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament were so temperamentally different that they were, in fact, two different Gods.
For the Ebionites, Christ was not a pre-existent divine being born to a virgin, but rather he was fully human and only became divine through the adoption of God upon his baptism. They based this on an early version of the Gospel of Matthew that scholars believe likely lacked chapters 1 & 2, and contained a textual variant in Chapter 3 verse 17. According to this variant, at the time of Jesus’s baptism, the “voice from heaven”, rather than saying “this is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased”, instead quoted Psalm 2:7 “You are my beloved son, today I have begotten you.”
Others believed that Christ was not human at all and any apparent appearances were phantasmal. Other still believed that there was not one God but there were 365 gods. Additionally, there was endless arguing about what books were credible and which were not relating to the establishment of the Biblical Canon. If you want any information on these points please reach out to me, I’ll bore you to tears. For the sake of brevity, however, I’ll move on. Suffice it to say, the range of “Christian” beliefs in the first couple Christian centuries was massive.
In more modern times, Christians have continued to argue about the true nature of Christ. Is he one part of the trinity, or is he the son of God, but not God himself as the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe?
what books of the Bible are canonical? Should we include the Apocrypha like the Catholics? or leave it out like the Protestants?
What is the nature of salvation? Are all human beings saved like universalists believe? Are only the elect saved like Calvinists believe, does salvation require good works like the Catholics believe, can one lose their salvation?
Is the Bible itself infallible like most evangelicals believe? do you have to be born again? Has the period of revelation ended, or are “modern” day prophets continuing to reveal God’s word like the Seventh Day Adventists, and in a much different way the Latter Day Saints, believe?
Does Hell exist? Is eternal torment taught in the Bible? etc etc etc….
This is just a small sampling of the questions that modern day Christians debate fiercely. Many are willing to openly condemn anyone who disagrees with their position as being heretical, or “not truly Christian”. Again, this implies that some level of purity about what “true” Christianity is can be known.
But true compared to what?
Most scholars concede that Christian beliefs in the first couple centuries following the life of Christ varied much more widely than modern-day Christian beliefs do, as I briefly mentioned above. This suggests that if “true” Christianity originates with Jesus’s own teachings that this truth was immediately lost (including with his own disciples as the debate between Peter and Paul indicates). Are those claiming to be “true” Christians today “pure” compared to this?
Some will argue that the church was guided by the Holy Spirit and began to find its home theologically around the time of Constantine and the Council of Nicea. This is the ecumenical council that began formalizing Christian theology about things like the nature of Christ and the Trinity. So, maybe people today are saying that this is where “pure” Christianity got its start. Yet, the second largest single Christian denomination in the world is Eastern Orthodoxy, accounting for over 270 million Christians worldwide, and the divide between Catholics/Protestants and the Eastern Orthodox Church has part of its roots in a disagreement about the nature of Christ, and the wording of a creed dating all the way back to the council of Nicea. Are all 270 million Eastern Orthodox Christians “not truly Christian”?
The Center for the Study of Global Christianity estimates that there are over 2.2 billion Christians, subscribing to over 43,000 Christian denominations worldwide. Any one person or denomination claiming that their translation of the Bible or their understanding of what it means to be Christian is purer than any other is spurious. After all, doesn’t every Christian think that their church, their denomination, or their personal conviction is correct? Are there people running around out there who know that what they believe about Christ is incorrect, but they persist in believing it anyways?
Often times I find myself in discussions where people insist that Christianity is a more reasonable worldview than atheism. My reply, which often gets misinterpreted as being condescending, is “which Christianity?” To which my counterpart generally just replies “Christianity, there is only one Christianity.” After I spend time explaining that that is not true, and detail exactly what I mean by the question, it is very VERY common for people to then leap to “well there are a lot of people in the world claiming to be Christian who aren’t actually Christian.” People say this, I think, because it is much more convenient to simply accuse all those that disagree with them of being wrong, rather than having to reflect upon the fact that Christianity is widely varying ideology and there are theological arguments to be made for every variety.
This is the underlying problem. There is no single standard by which we can judge a “true Christian” versus a “fake Christian.” We have no meaningful litmus test or standard bearer. If people say “Jesus is the standard bearer” that is fine, and if there is an answer to this puzzle that is certainly it. That said, what Jesus taught has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways since the day he died. So, what people really mean when they say “Jesus is the Standard Bearer” or “The Bible is the litmus test” is “MY understanding of Jesus/the Bible is the standard.” In effect, without knowing it, people inevitably substitute their interpretation of Christ’s teachings for Christ’s actual teachings, and their interpretation of the Bible, as God’s word itself (if such a thing exists).
Speaking as an atheist and infant Biblical scholar I find it ironic that so many Christians in the United States believe that there is a secular war on religion. It seems to me that the real “war on Christianity” is Christianity’s own inability to reasonably deal with the pervasive theological pluralism within their own belief structure.
My advice to Christians is this: Stop using “fake Christians” as a rhetorical device to make your life easier. There is much to be studied here, put in the work. If you disagree with someone’s understanding of their faith, talk to them about it, don’t call them “fake”. They aren’t any more or less fake than you, and simply saying it loudly won’t change that. If we all commit to studying more, conversing with respect, and trying to understand each other rather than tear each other down, maybe we can begin to change the rotten tone of public discourse that this country is currently bogged down in.
1 Peter 3:15-16 “…Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; 16 yet do it with gentleness and respect…”
Christjahn 