Who is a Christian?

Here is how Russell Moore, the Southern Baptist pastor who heads the church’s Washington office, responded to the murder of the 21 Coptic Christians by ISIS:

A number of Southern Baptists had similar responses. The Southern Baptist bloggers at Pulpit & Pen will have you know that this is a betrayal:

My first response to this is that it is repellent pedantry. Their execution video shows that some of these men called out the name of Jesus as they were having their heads chopped off by these barbarians. Yet these Baptist bloggers contend that they are not Christian because they hold to the faith as delivered to them by their ancestors (the Coptic Church was founded around the year 42 by St. Mark, author of one of the Gospels). Yet because they didn’t hold in their heads — the same heads the Muslims cut off — doctrines espoused by Southern Baptists, a church that came into existence approximately 1,900 years after the Coptic Church began, they are not Christians?

I like what Pope Francis said about the martyrs, and agree with him 100 percent:

I wish it were possible to dismiss the legalistic posturing of the Baptist bloggers without giving it a second thought, but the discomfiting truth is that they have a point.

What they’ve done is draw a line between who is in the Church, and who is out of it. This is historically and theologically a sound practice. This is something that has always been done in Christianity. Go to Acts 15 to learn about the Council of Jerusalem. What counts as authentically Christian, and what puts one outside the Church? It might sound silly to many of us that these Southern Baptists do not consider Catholics, Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox (e.g., the Copts) — that is, most of the Christians in the world today — to be truly Christian, but few of us would deny the importance of drawing the theological line somewhere.

In the year 451, the Pope and the other Patriarchs excommunicated the so-called Oriental Orthodox for holding a heterodox Christology. In other words, they put them outside the Church. I don’t know what the status is today among the churches.

Kyrill, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, sent condolences to the Coptic Pope and the Egyptian president regarding the murder of the 21 Copts. Kyrill referred to the dead as “Christians,” and told the Coptic Pope that “we” Christians must stand together. I don’t know for certain how we should interpret that, but it seems clear to me that Kyrill sees the Copts as Christians, however imperfect our communion.

In the Christian past, we have murdered our own for heresy. Think of the Catholic crusade against the Albigensians. The Russian Orthodox hunted down the schismatic Archpriest Avvakum, tortured him, and burned him at the stake. Calvinists burned Michael Servetus at the stake for denying the Holy Trinity.

Whatever their theological errors, might they have been more essentially Christian than the theologically correct who murdered them for their heterodoxy?

Difficult questions. Speaking for myself alone, I believe that the fullness of truth, as it can be known to us mortals, is taught by the Orthodox Church, but that we can only say who is and is not in communion with it; we can’t say who God will or will not save. The formulation I like is, “We can say where the Church is, but we cannot say where it is not.” I would say that all Christians should be in union with Orthodoxy if they would have the fullness of the truth, but I would not say, “Therefore, those who are not Orthodox are strangers to Christ.” In fact, Jesus Himself said to us, in Matthew 25, how He will know His own:

I’m not God, but if I were a betting man, I would place my money on Coptic Christians who called on the name of Jesus as they were about to be killed for being Christian to make it into the Kingdom before Americans who stand on doctrinal differences to deny the faithfulness of the martyrs. Note well: doctrinal issues are important! They just aren’t the most important thing. I believe I hold the correct doctrines, but I have absolutely no doubt that there will be countless Southern Baptists (and others) who go before me into the Kingdom (assuming that I will make it!) because however incorrect their doctrines, they embodied the spirit of Christ in the lives they lived.

To be a true Christian is not simply to hold all the correct propositions in your head. These legalistic American theologians have given their minds over to ideas about Christ; those Copts gave their heads for Christ.

UPDATE: I have delinked to Pulpit & Pen after receiving this e-mail from a reader:

it’s not my place to say anyone is lost.

What sophistry! You equate us with Gnostics as being "outside the Apostolic Faith and the Church of Christ" because they refused to partake of the Eucharist, and commend "the intellectual honesty of these baptists who attack the Coptic martyrs as pagans" but when called to plainly affirm that all are lost who reject the so-called Cath. "Real Presence," then you given the plea, "it’s not my place to say anyone is lost."

Man up! Either you affirm the "verily verily" Jn. 6:53 as an unequivocal imperative to believe in the "Real Presence" (though apparently originally an Anglican term) or you do not! Why is this so difficult to do so?

we can say what Paul said to Titus about those who opposed the Apostolic Faith in his day:

What blindness!, which examples what i had just said, that your faith cannot be established upon Scriptural substantiation. For Paul is not at all dealing with reproof of a church due to its traditions, but instead he actually warns about "Jewish fables, and commandments of men, that turn from the truth," and of the "unruly and vain talkers and deceivers" who "subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre's sake," who are "alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies," and for whom "is nothing pure," easily pertains to Rome in history, esp. as in leading up to the needed reformation:

• Cardinal Bellarmine:

"Some years before the rise of the Lutheran and Calvinistic heresy, according to the testimony of those who were then alive, there was almost an entire abandonment of equity in ecclesiastical judgments; in morals, no discipline; in sacred literature, no erudition; in divine things, no reverence; religion was almost extinct. (Concio XXVIII. Opp. Vi. 296- Colon 1617, in “A History of the Articles of Religion,” by Charles Hardwick, Cp. 1, p. 10,)

• Erasmus, in his new edition of the “Enchiridion: “What man of real piety does not perceive with sighs that this is far the most corrupt of all ages? When did iniquity abound with more licentiousness? When was charity so cold?” (“The Evolution of the English Bible: A Historical Sketch of the Successive,” p. 132 by Henry William Hamilton-Hoare)

Ratzinger:

"For nearly half a century, the Church was split into two or three obediences that excommunicated one another, so that every Catholic lived under excommunication by one pope or another, and, in the last analysis, no one could say with certainty which of the contenders had right on his side. The Church no longer offered certainty of salvation; she had become questionable in her whole objective form--the true Church, the true pledge of salvation, had to be sought outside the institution. (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith for the Church of Rome, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989) p.196).

In addition to her forgeries

with their mouths they claim to know Jesus and believe in Him, but their deeds of attacking Him by attacking the historical orthodox Universal Church prove they don’t know Him

That is a logical fallacy, as it presumes the very thing that needs to be proved, that Rome is both the one true church and that it is above reproach so that those who reprove here must be wrong and are not Christians.

And which argument was asserting brings you right back to the very issue i stated was fundamental, which is that of the basis for your assurance of Truth.

For it seems that the RC argument is that an assuredly (if conditionally) infallible magisterium is essential for determination and assurance of Truth (including writings and men being of God) and to fulfill promises of Divine presence, providence of Truth, and preservation of faith, and authority. (Jn. 14:16,26; 15:26; 16:13; Mt. 16:18; Lk. 10:16)

And that being the historical instruments and stewards of Divine revelation (oral and written) means that Rome is that assuredly infallible magisterium. Thus any who knowingly dissent from the latter must be in rebellion to God.

Affirm or deny.

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