The question of who is,
and who is not, a Christian never seems to go away.
I know that the Bible goes to great lengths
to define how a disciple of Jesus Christ thinks, what they feel, and what they
do, but the vast variety of people utilizing the name of Christ continue to
bring this question to the surface.
In
my book,
Christianity's Big Tent, analyzing 1 John, I relied solely upon his three tests of faith: Do you
believe that Jesus is the Son of God?
Do
you love your fellow Christians?
And do
you obey the commandments of God?
For
some, however, such a broad definition leaves too many unanswered questions.
I was watching a couple of YouTube videos last night of
John MacArthur, a man whose name carries a lot of weight among Evangelicals, in
which he clearly threw both Catholics and Charismatic Christians out of the
defined Church. In both cases, MacArthur
believes that the vast majority of people, who belong to those Churches, are in
fact non-Christians still destined for hell.
As I’ve said before, this way of defining the Church leaves us with an
end result where 90-95% of the people in the world who think they are a
Christian are not, and leaves us with a Church that can only be described as a
pathetic version of the triumphant Church that was supposed to take the Gospel
to the whole world.
In the case of the Catholic Church, the primary objection
of men like MacArthur, such as RC Sproul and John Piper, is the way in which
the Catholic Church (as well as the Orthodox, Anglicans, and to a lesser
extent, Lutherans and Methodists too)
defines what is happening during Communion.
Because these followers of Jesus take his words “literally”, instead of
seeing it as a symbolic act, they are doomed.
There is more to it than that, such as objections about the elevation of
tradition to the level of the Scriptures and prayer to the Saints and Mary, but
the heart of the objection to the Catholic Church has always been
transubstantiation. The Council of Trent
is still a difficult thing to deal with, its doctrines in response to the
Reformation were not helpful, but then again neither was the 30 Years War. Even with that historical baggage, shouldn’t
Vatican II mean something? Should we let
the failures of the past that brought the Church to the point of schism be
perpetuated?
With
that in mind, here is the tally of what the average Catholic believes that isn’t
supposed to help save them due to a faulty understanding of Communion:
1. There is only one God,
a trinity consisting of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
2. The Bible is the Word of
God, inspired and to be revered.
3. All of humanity is sinful;
each of us must repent of our sins.
4. The only hope for us
to overcome our sin is the death and resurrection of Jesus.
5. Prayer and worship are
important parts of being a Christian
6. Obeying God’s law is
important, as are acts of loving kindness.
Can you have all of this, and still be a “Church of
Satan?” as MacArthur concludes? RC
Sproul believes that praying to the Saints is belittling the desire of God to
use his grace by thinking that you need an intermediary. Whether or not this objection is valid, isn’t
saying that 95% of would-be Christians have failed due to their theology,
despite the fact that they affirm the Nicene Creed, an insult to the power of
the grace of God? Did Christ really die
for the sins of the world only to have that power fail 95% of the time?
The objection to the Charismatic movement follows similar
lines. In this case it isn’t any core
doctrine that is being misunderstood but an objection to the idea that the
gifts of the Spirit as seen in Acts are still in use today. Once again, this is a question of
interpretation of Scripture, with one side seeing God’s work as a temporary
solution and the other as a part of God’s ongoing plan. That there are legitimate reasons to be
concerned with the Prosperity Gospel movement is no reason to throw all those
who still believe in the gifts of the Spirit out the door of the Church.
One last thing that I find troubling with John MacArthur’s
view of the Church is that he believes that between AD 400 and AD 1500, there
was no real Church, only an Apostate Church.
Thus for 1,100 years, the Church of Jesus Christ was only a shell that
required any “real” Christians to not be a part of the community of believers,
but instead to be rebels and martyrs.
The Church certainly had flaws during that time period, as it does
today, but to dismiss the work of God in our world for over a millennium is a
startling conclusion.
Why do so many Evangelicals, of which I am one, prefer to
think that the Church is a tiny persecuted minority, a frail and threatened
thing that is dwarfed by apostasy? Is
this some sort of perverse glory in being the only ones who have it right? Is this the result of dispensational
theology, a pre-tribulation emphasis that almost hopes that the world is
getting worse and the Church failing so Christ can return soon? Whatever the reasons are, I can’t be on board
with that attitude, the Gospel of Jesus Christ is far too powerful to be
thought of as so very weak.
