Biblical Litmus Tests, The Rise of the Nones, and Today’s Acts 15 Crisis

The church had a problem, something that could have effectively kept it from passing on the faith to the next generation. As the gospel was rapidly advancing in the first century from a purely Jewish faith to a Gentile dominated faith, the Jews got nervous. People who didn’t look like them, talk like them or act like them were flooding into the church. There was no regard for the old ways, the old covenant, the Jewish traditions. And so certain Jewish leaders within the church began to teach the Gentiles that they must become Jewish first in order to become Christian (Acts 15:1).

This caused an existential crisis in the church, as the church had to wrestle with whether adherence to the Jewish Law was a litmus test to salvation. Thankfully the church got it right (read Acts 15 for the whole story), the crisis was averted, and the gospel was safely passed down through the generations to us today. And yet we see the principles of the same crisis playing out today.

The church has a problem, something that could keep it from effectively passing on the faith to the next generation. The rapid increase of those claiming no religious affiliation (hence the term ‘nones’) should raise alarm bells throughout American Christendom. People are growing more and more skeptical of the claims of the Bible. The Evangelical world has dug in their heels and have planted their flag on making a systematic defense of the entire Bible, both Old and New Testaments. The reliability and infallibility of the Bible in light of modern science, archaeology and general skepticism has inadvertently become a new litmus test for salvation. Just as Jewish Christians preached 2000 years ago that people must be circumcised before they were saved, so today some Evangelical leaders are making a belief in all 66 books of the Christian canon a litmus test for acceptance in the faith.

Requiring belief in the whole Bible prior to salvation is an unnecessary hurdle to put in front of an increasingly skeptical nation. (Some would read that last statement to accuse me of not holding to the inerrancy of Scripture. That would be a false accusation.) Our faith rests on a person (Jesus) and an event (the resurrection). The Bible didn’t cause those events to happen, it recorded those events. At the end of the day, a person’s salvation isn’t dependent on whether they believe in all the Bible, but whether they believe in Jesus and his resurrection.

That argument (Jesus and the resurrection), should take precedence over trying to defend passages in the Old Testament that because of sheer time are almost impossible to prove scientifically and archaeologically. What’s at stake? The next generation. Roughly 23% of Americans claim ‘none’ as their religious affiliation, an increase of 7% in just a few short years. The leadership of the church in Acts 15 made some bold decisions to ensure that Gentiles who were turning to God had as few hurdles to jump over as possible to get to salvation.

I fully and firmly believe in the inerrancy of Scripture. But I believe that is not a pre-requisite for salvation. I believe that this conviction will happen naturally through discipleship once a believer is saved. Making this a litmus test for salvation itself is comparable to Jewish leaders calling for circumcision as a litmus test for salvation 2000 years ago. May we be as bold as the early church in Acts 15 and get this issue right.