Or, what I should say is, what a person or congregation confesses about Christ matters. There are certain things that are within Christian Orthodoxy and certain things that are not.
Now I grant that it's pretty hotly debated as to what constitutes said Christian Orthodoxy. In days of yore, Christianity took a very hard line to this question. Orthodoxy was a very narrow way found in one place. What that one place was depended on who you were asking. Of course the Pope claimed primacy and Rome claimed infallibility in doctrine. They still do claim those things, despite softening somewhat at the Vatican II council; declaring the possibility of salvation outside of the Roman Church, even going as far as to call Protestants "separated brethren."
Of course, the East claims the same. They are the Church. So do other churches and sects.
Ultimately, I am proposing a very deep question here. It is one that I am not going to be able to answer perfectly, nor will I even bother trying to answer it perfectly. In fact, I am not sure I'll be able to give one. But I will offer a few suggestions at the conclusion of the post.
The main thrust of this post is to look at what 20th and 21st century Christianity believes about this situation and how we have handled it.
I assert that 20th and 21st century Christianity has handled this situation in a very lamentable manner. When faced with the question: Who is a Christian? Postmodern Christianity answers in a very minimalist manner.
Now days, your average 21st century American Christian is willing to affirm anyone to be a Christian so long as they love Jesus, nothing further needed. It doesn't matter what they believe about Jesus and what they confess. This is evidenced by the complete foolishness of much of American Christianity going gaga over Glenn Beck's rally about morals and values in Washington. For those of you who do not know, Glenn Beck is a Mormon. To affirm that Glenn Beck is a Christian or that he speaks for Christian values is pretty much to reject everything that Christians have always believed. To be clear, Mormonism is just as far from Christ as the Jehovah's Witnesses, Islam, or Buddhism.
But we just seem to not care anymore. Heck, the JWs say they love Jesus, right? Glenn Beck says he does too, correct?
And that is just it. Much of American Christianity has abandoned confession, abandoned THE confessions, abandoned the creeds, and heck, abandoned the Gospel. All this in favor of replacing the Gospel with...with...with...yep, you guessed it: The Law.
The 21st century Gospel is not Christ crucified for the forgiveness of your sins. It's not even Christ for you. It's me for God. The 21st century Gospel is: Love God and love others. (Mat 22:37 ff.) It doesn't matter what you believe about God. It doesn't matter what you think Christ did for us. It just matters that you love God and love your neighbor, no matter what your god happens to look like.
This is NOT good news! This is, in fact, really BAD news. Because, as we confess, we have not loved God with our whole hearts and have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
To be blunt: Much of 21st century Christianity, especially in America, is grounded in nothing. Well, unless you count our works as something. But it really doesn't matter what you believe most of the time.
What is the remedy? Who should be considered Christians? I have a few suggestions, but I'm certainly not claiming to have answered the question definitively.
The quick answer is, we need Confessional Christianity. We need to be catechized about the doctrines of the Christian faith. We need to know what constitutes orthodoxy, heterodoxy, and outright heresy. We needn't be afraid of offending someone by saying they are without reservation outside of the Christian faith, whether they be Mormon, Jehovah's Witness, Pelagian, or Word of Faith.
The fact of the matter is that there are *many* heretical congregations out there that claim the Name of Christ, and most 21st century American Christians say: Praise God! There are my brothers and sisters in another building.
Nonsense.
So where do we begin? I suggest a few things. First, although we ought to confess Scripture alone as the only infallible authority, that does not mean that Scripture is the only authority. For instance, we have three ecumenical creeds (Apostles, Nicene, Athanasian) that properly summarize orthodox Christian teaching that is taught in the Holy Scriptures. Let's start there. Can a Mormon affirm those three ecumenical creeds? Heck no they can't. The Athanasian Creed in particular is completely wrong in their theology.
The Creeds are an excellent starting point, but they cannot be everything we confess, even though they certainly must be the core of what we confess. I suggest the next step is to check out the ecumenical councils of the early church. The councils tell us the orthodox positions on the person of Christ and give sharp definition to the doctrine of original sin, among other things.
Many people these days decry the church councils as well as the Creeds, and they do so with some really bad argumentation that betrays a functional Pelagian understanding of Christianity. They dismiss the Creeds and the councils in favor of sovereign individual interpretation of Scripture. Sorry Roman Catholics, this mindset is not a hallmark of Protestantism. It's a hallmark of people who have abandoned both Roman Catholicism as well as traditional Protestantism.
Me, my Bible, and the Holy Spirit is not at all what the Reformers meant by sola scriptura.
What we need to do is look to the entire history of the Christian church. Yes, Scripture is the only infallible authority (sorry Francis). But we are wise to look and see what Christianity has universally taught for 2000 years. Likewise, we are wise to look and see what Christianity has universally condemned as heresy for 2000 years.
And we're fools if we don't. We're fools if we think that we are the ones who have really arrived. We're fools if we think that we have nothing to learn from the great theological giants who have gone before us. We're fools if we think that we alone have the only proper interpretation of Scripture because after all, the Holy Spirit told us so in our own little personal reading of Scripture one night.
In other words, the Church must have authority too. Not on an infallible level like the inspired Holy Scriptures, of course. But the Church must have sway. After all, Jesus entrusted the Word and Sacraments to the Church, not as a bunch of individual interpreters, but as an institution that delivers a Kingdom through the means of grace.
I think that is a fair starting point. And I think if people would look into these things more, a lot of this "everyone is a Christian who says the words 'I love God' would disappear. You have to know who Christ is and what He has done for us.
After all, that is the Gospel.
Pax
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