Spotting "Fake Christians" along Doctrinal Lines

I just read a disturbing blog post at an Evangelical blog that I follow: 7 questions that help spot fake Christians Go there and read to understand what I'm talking about.

Back? OK. Now, in my opinion the term 'Fake Christian' should be reserved for an in-name-only Christian who has no commitment to the faith, is not 'saved' and is likely not bound for heaven. For those of us who are non-fake Christians, that's an important distinction. A nominal Christian--- who usually knows little of the faith and either does not attend church or does so for social reasons only--- needs to be educated on the faith, and may cast a bad light on the faith by their actions since some perceive them as Christians.

There were several things that bothered me about the 'Seven Questions'.

1. The tone of the questions was very specific to a certain type of Evangelical Christian. People outside those Christians circles, no matter that they are devoted Christians, may be perceived as 'fake Christians'.

2. Some of the 'Seven Questions' can be answered only by God. 'Are they controlled by the Holy Spirit?' 'Do they have a new nature?' Only God can know for sure.

3. The 'Seven Questions' encourage us to disobey the 'judge not' command of Jesus. If we are examining other people's lives for clues that they are not Spirit-controlled, we are judging them in a way Christ forbids. Besides the sin aspect of this, when real non-Christians see us making such judgments they decide that Christians are all unloving and judgmental. Plus, we will find situations like this: Jerry looks at possible 'fake Christian' John and sees that John still drinks a beer now and then, still smokes cigarettes, and still goes to visit his elderly homosexual great-uncle Bill in the nursing home without preaching fire-and-brimstone at him. "Aha!" Jerry says. "A fake Christian!" No, it's more likely that John is simply from a church with different teachings (doctrines) that does not require giving up alcohol and tobacco for salvation, and that teaches that one should show the love of Christ to homosexual persons, even if those persons are seriously sinful (as not all homosexuals are, some are celibate, voluntarily or otherwise).

4. The seventh question may be designed to expose Catholics as 'fake Christians'. Catholics ask for the prayers of saints in the same way they ask their living friends to pray for him, but certain hostile-to-Catholic Evangelicals go around preaching that Catholics trust to Mary instead of Jesus for salvation.

5. This 'Seven Questions' post leads to another post with a lot more evangelization questions. One of the questions on this second post, meant to be asked to the subject of the evangelization and which presumably detects the 'unsaved' state, is 'Are you 100% sure you'd go to heaven if you died?" This is a question which is specific to the 'once-saved always safe' dogma believed by some but not all Evangelicals and which is not what the Bible and Early Church teach. It IS possible for a Christian to fall away from the faith, even to become hostile to the faith. Some even go from being a 'saved' Christian child to being an adult who, like Josef Stalin, hates and kills Christians. The only way the 'once saved always safe' believers get around this fact is to claim that those who fall away weren't saved properly. Which leads to what I experienced as a child in Presbyterian Sunday School. I 'got saved' by praying a version of the 'Sinner's Prayer', but my life was not wholly transformed in the way some Christian books said would happen. I was the same little kid with problems (undiagnosed Asperger Syndrome) which didn't go away and make me like the joyful spirit-filled, doubt-free Christians in the books. So, I figured I wasn't REALLY saved--- a possibility the OSAS folks mentioned. So I got saved again. And again. And always worried I was hell-bound and without Christ in my life. The uncertainty caused by that false doctrine may have contributed from my later falling away from the faith for many years. Well, now I'm a Catholic. I know I'm not 100% guaranteed of heaven because I have the free will to turn away from God at any time, and as a mere human I can never be sure 100% of what choices I will make in the future.

The Take-Away for Christians
We are not called by Christ to judge who is for-sure saved and who not. Even when we are in the position of helping to choose someone for a responsible position in the Church we can only judge whether that person, right now, seems to be a faithful Christian living a Christian life. So if we want to evangelize, rather than judging we should be dropping 'seeds' of faith whether we are talking to a foul-mouthed streetwalker or a Christian evangelist or even the Pope.

The Take-Away for Christian Writers
In our local church we learn what our denomination (or 'non-denomination') teaches about what it means to be a Christian and what the Christian life would be like. And some denominations are more accurate than others. But as writers we are speaking to a broader group of Christians than at our church, and we need to understand the other Christian 'faith-languages' so we will not be leading other Christians astray by our writing.

The Take-Away for Non-Christian Writers
Wow! Thanks for sticking with me through this post. As an ex-non-Christian myself I know it may have been dull. But the take-home for you is simply this: for a Christian, the word 'Christian' has a specific meaning. It may vary a bit around the edges but the core is the same. (To discover this meaning, perhaps read C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. Or at least the common Evangelical tract The Four Spiritual Laws--- Google it.) Some non-Christian writers of the past have used 'Christian' to mean 'a nice person', but Christians don't understand it that way--- in fact, Christians believe that many Christians are not nice at all, though nicer than that specific person would be without Christ. Other non-Christian writers use 'Christian' to mean 'those uneducated Fundamentalists I've read about and don't like'. Well, if you are on that path I won't try to talk you out of it. I might have done the same thing at one point in my life. But I think the more sophisticated and knowledgeable among the non-Christian readers--- the only readers you will get with that approach--- may take exception, perhaps because they have Christian family members and friends that the love, and may even respect as thinking human beings who simply have the 'wrong' opinion on the religion thing.

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