{"id":12676,"date":"2020-07-01T09:27:33","date_gmt":"2020-07-01T13:27:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/preventingrace\/?p=12676"},"modified":"2020-07-01T09:27:33","modified_gmt":"2020-07-01T13:27:33","slug":"how-can-you-know-if-youre-a-christian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/preventingrace\/2020\/07\/01\/how-can-you-know-if-youre-a-christian\/","title":{"rendered":"How Can You Know If You’re A Christian?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here is a bit of an angry piece<\/a>. Evangelicals deserve to be cancelled, says Jonathan Merritt, because they started it first:<\/p>\n

Beyond the SBC, one of the best-known examples of evangelical cancel culture involved the public shaming of author Rob Bell, a former megachurch pastor who dared to question whether non-Christians went to hell after they died. Strictly, Bell was not \u201ccanceled,\u201d but \u201cfarewelled\u201d \u2014 the patent online move was simply to bid \u201cFarewell, Rob Bell,\u201d next to a link to his apostasy. Suddenly, anyone who was friends with Bell, owned books by Bell or even dared to quote Bell\u2019s earlier work was at risk of being canceled as well. Since then, other Christian writers, including Jen Hatmaker and Rachel Held Evans, found their books no longer welcome in Christian bookstores due to their support for same-sex marriage. Now the tables have turned. Something shifted in 2016 after the election of Donald Trump. The rapidly proliferating groups evangelicals had been marginalizing and attacking \u2014 women, people of color, feminists, immigrants, LGBTQ people \u2014 recognized that they had their own pulpits on social media. They began to sermonize back. This \u201cGreat Awokening\u201d\u00a0 has flipped the script on cancel culture, and white evangelicals are calling for a rewrite.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, a few days after this piece came out, Matt tweeted<\/a> that Mr. Merritt himself is not a Christian, which, I suppose, Mr. Merritt would count as being \u201ccancelled,\u201d though not, as he says at the end of the piece, in the least bit ironic.<\/p>\n

Seriously, we need more and better classes on irony. But until then, I have two things to say.<\/p>\n

First, it is pretty undeniable that \u201cEvangelicalism\u201d\u2014whatever that entails now and did back in the dark ages\u2014squandered a lot of the daylight by majoring on the minors. Tinky-Winky of the Teletubbies did not really deserve the attention he got, and it was a bad idea to focus a lot more on how everybody was behaving than on the gospel itself. I actually find it sort of tragical, in a bleak and funny kind of way, that people now are saying things like, \u201cIt\u2019s not enough just to preach the gospel\u201d in regards to race, because, as I\u2019ve said thousands of times, it\u2019s never<\/em> been tried\u2014not before, not now. Behavior modification sermons are not the gospel. They just aren\u2019t. Sermons about the lengths of the dresses and how often you \u201chave a quiet time\u201d are not the gospel. Study groups about how to be encouraged when you\u2019re really down, books about how to raise your children to be Christian, youth camps designed to keep everyone\u2019s roiling lust at bay\u2014all these are not the gospel. Some of them might be fruits of the gospel (or not\u2014some of them are too weird for that), but they were never the gospel. The people explaining now that the gospel is not enough to deal with the horrors of racism and ethnic prejudice, and even systemic injustice, don\u2019t know if it\u2019s not because it\u2019s never been tried. Indeed, they have only traded one kind of behavior modification \u201cgospel\u201d for another, in this case, a currently culturally acceptable one. So that\u2019s too bad. And in so far as \u201cEvangelicals\u201d have been awfully hypocritical\u2014especially about the religiosity and morality of Mr. Trump\u2014they deserve the scorn of Mr. Merritt.<\/p>\n

Second\u2014and I trust you hear that my<\/em> tone is in no way scornful\u2014not everyone who says he is a Christian is a Christian. Not everyone who claims Jesus loves Jesus. Not everyone who says, \u201cLord, Lord\u201d will be embraced by the Lord of Life. To some when he comes again in glory and they anxiously sidle up to him, he will say, \u201cI never knew you.\u201d It is actually the job<\/em> of Christian pastors to \u201cguard the flock\u201d which means saying to the people in their sway, \u201cThat person says she is a Christian but she is not a Christian, please do not listen to her or do what she says.\u201d That\u2019s not \u201ccancelling,\u201d it\u2019s the job. Now, is the job done badly? Often. When a Christian pastor wastes his time on Tinky-Winky, that is a crying shame. When a Christian pastor is himself racist, this is not ok. But when Mr. Piper tweets, \u201cFarewell Rob Bell\u201d and Rob Bell has persistently and deliberately undermined the substance of the Christian faith, Mr. Piper is actually just doing his job. Rob Bell is not a Christian, Jen Hatmaker is not a Christian, Glennon Doyle is not a Christian, that person on twitter who tweeted a string of, \u201cI\u2019m a Christian but I don\u2019t go to church; I\u2019m a Christian and I believe that Love is Love,\u201d that person is not a Christian.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s actually quite easy to know who is a Christian and who is not. We\u2019re not talking about eternal destiny here. That is up to God. He can bring any wretched sinner to repentant faith even in the final hour of life. I think we will be surprised about who is in heaven and who is not (well, not \u201cWe\u201d\u2026some of us won\u2019t be there, as I just said). But as for who is a part of the visible body of Christ now? That isn\u2019t actually hard. If you confess the faith of Christ crucified, if you accept the words of our Lord (which is the whole Bible) as true, if you try to conform your life to that strange and painful truth, other people will be able to see that you\u2019re a Christian. This necessarily excludes the vast swaths of people who think that it\u2019s fine to be LGBTQ affirming, because\u2014and I know this is very hard to understand\u2014the scripture does not allow it. You\u2019ll notice that the effort to make the scripture LGBTQ affirming is fast fading away because it\u2019s so hard and impossible to do. There are other ways to not be a Christian\u2014to deny the trinity, to deny that Jesus is both fully God and fully Man, to deny the resurrection, to deny the virgin birth, to deny the right of God to judge to the world, to redefine words like \u201cLove\u201d and \u201cSelfless\u201d and \u201cGod\u201d\u2014goodness, we\u2019ve made up quite a list over the centuries. But just now, the biggest and most alluring way not to be a Christian is to embrace the LGBTQ heresy, that other gospel.<\/p>\n

Now, should Christians actually \u201ccancel\u201d people who claim to be Christian and yet embrace this heresy? No. I don\u2019t think Mr. Merritt and Ms. Hatmaker should be \u201ccancelled,\u201d though it was absolutely sane of Lifeway to stop selling Ms. Hatmaker\u2019s books. I think they should go on living and being people. But I do think that true Christians should call out to them to repent. One way to do that is to say, \u201cYou\u2019re not a Christian\u2014yet\u2026would you like to be one? Let me tell you about our Lord.\u201d It may feel like cancelling but it\u2019s not actually cancelling. It may feel \u201cunloving\u201d but it is actually what God does with us\u2014when we were wrong and bad, he came and told us In Person that we were wrong and bad. We did not want him to tell us this and so we gathered up our rage and killed him. And yet he, in his great mercy, used that very action of attempted deicide to save us and make it possible for us not to be separated from him forever.<\/p>\n

I guess I\u2019ve said lots more than two things. I\u2019ll just say one more. The heart of the gospel is Jesus saving sinners, which means that sinners have to agree that they need to be saved. Any pride, any vainglory, any attempt to be \u201cok,\u201d to be good without God is wicked. God\u2019s love demands that we sinners repent, we say we are sorry, we ask God to forgive us. When anyone<\/em> goes to him in humility, in ash and with weeping, he welcomes that one into his Kingdom.<\/p>\n

So yes, Mr. Merritt is not a Christian, but he could be, if he would turn back and run into the arms of his Lord.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here is a bit of an angry piece. Evangelicals deserve to be cancelled, says Jonathan Merritt, because they started it first: Beyond the SBC, one of the best-known examples of evangelical cancel culture involved the public shaming of author Rob Bell, a former megachurch pastor who dared to question whether non-Christians went to hell after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2373,"featured_media":12677,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[34,48,64],"class_list":["post-12676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-demotivations-with-anne","tag-culture-watch","tag-just-plain-spiritual","tag-vanity"],"yoast_head":"\nHow Can You Know If You're A Christian?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Here is a bit of an angry piece. 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