The Church Is Bigger Than You Want It To Be

by James Davisson

Once when I was in college, a friend of mine made some disparaging remarks about Christians. I don't remember what he was objecting to—people who bomb abortion clinics or whatever, some extreme thing—and I helpfully pointed out that people who did that sort of thing aren't really Christians. "That's just the 'no true Scotsman' defense," he retorted.

I had nothing to say to that, mostly because I'd never heard the phrase "no true Scotsman." I think it's a phrase Christians would do well to remember.

First, an explanation: "no true Scotsman" is a logical fallacy that gets used sometimes when people argue. Person A states a generalization ("No Scotsman hates haggis!"), Person B finds a counterexample ("I'm a Scotsman and I hate haggis!") and Person A excludes that example with hand waving ("Well, no true Scotsman hates haggis!") without referring to any external, objective rule.

I definitely used this flawed defense in my argument with my friend. No one had ever told me I couldn't.

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Christians are quite fond of dismissing each other as "not really Christian" when they disagree with each other's actions or beliefs. Three examples, running across a spectrum of beliefs and circumstances:

Rebels in northern CAR. Source.

1. As you may know, there is currently an ongoing crisis of horrific violence in the Central African Republic. In a recent article, local Catholic priests were described providing shelter for Muslims fleeing the people who would murder them, Christian militias known as "anti-balaka." In the article, one priest is quoted as saying, understandably, "the anti-Balaka are not Christians." 



2. Christian charity World Vision recently announced that, in view of the fact that many church denominations have become open and affirming towards LGBTQ persons, it would begin hiring people in same-sex marriages on its staff. When thousands of people decided to stop donating on the grounds that they could no longer consider World Vision a truly Christian organization, World Vision reversed its decision. Other Christians subsequently pointed out that refusing to hire gay people is, to their minds, not really Christian. 





Not Phelps, but one of his cronies. Source.

3. Notorious bigot Fred Phelps recently died. While Christians have had much to say about that fact, few are standing up and claiming that he was a Christian just like them. Phelps was, in fact, a pastor, who preached weekly from the same Bible as all Christians, from his church in Westboro, Kansas.

As far as the world is concerned, these people are Christians. They call themselves Christians, they go to church, they talk about Jesus, they read the Bible—these are the things Christians do. They are Christians. Our internal disputes about what a Christian really is—like, "someone who is for/against gay marriage," "someone who is pro-life/pro-choice," "someone who is patriotic/anti-war," "someone who is not a complete asshat"—are immaterial to outsiders, and what's more, they typically have little or nothing to do with the central tenets of the church that formally define the core of the Christian faith.*

Refusing the label "Christian" to people we disagree with—even when that disagreement is passionate and seems vital—is a crutch. It is an excuse to dismiss someone. And it is not convincing; to an outsider, it sounds like the old joke that the worst player on your team is actually the best player for the other team—it's funny, but few people are likely to take you at your word.

Dismissing others as "not really Christian" allows Christians to free themselves from blame for their actions and to make no effort to engage, correct, or counteract fellow Christians who do wrong. If people call themselves Christians, it is up to their fellow Christians to point out when they are not imitating Christ, and to actively oppose them when they do so. We neglect this duty when we simply reject them as Christians.

Conversely, we also risk missing possibly valid points of view, ideas that bear considering, when we dismiss others as "not really Christian." It's a lot easier to ignore fellow Christians if we simply refuse to consider them Christians at all.

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Let me be clear: I am not saying anything about whether anyone in the list above is following the example of Christ. Several of them very plainly are not, to my mind. I am also making no claims about the nature, or reality, of the personal faith of those involved, or whether any of them are saved.

What I am saying instead is that, as Christians, anyone who confesses the central tenets of the faith, and claims the label "Christian," is our responsibility. To borrow an ecclesiastical term, all such persons are part of the "church visible"—the institution of the church and the body of believers on earth. Whether they are recognized by God as part of the "church invisible"—the "true" church of God (the true Scotsmen?) is simply unknown to any living person, and we therefore have no way to judge and should not try.**

In other words, it is not up to us sort the wheat from the tares ourselves. Let us instead focus on planting as many good seeds as possible.

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*Human sexuality, the dignity of human life, and issues surrounding force and violence are all important matters, but you will not find any of them in the creeds set out by the early church councils, which formally define the boundaries of orthodox Christianity. The ideas inside these creeds are the dogmas of the faith; stepping outside of them is heresy. Important topics not addressed in the creeds are matters of doctrine; different denominations disagree on doctrines; all are still Christian so long as they do not stray from the central dogmas. Things outside of the central dogmas but permitted by the church are sometimes called adiaphora, "things not essential" or "matters of indifference." I like this word and don't get to use it very often.
**I note here that the church invisible is almost certainly not a smaller circle within the church visible; rather, the church visible is a circle in a Venn diagram that overlaps with the church invisible. In other words, there are undoubtedly people who do not profess Christianity yet nevertheless are members of the church, doing God's work in the world.

Sex, Christ, and the End of Time

He's coming, he's coming, HE'S COMING

by James Davisson


One of the most fascinating things about Christianity is that—alone among the major religions of the modern world—it began as a doomsday cult. This has had interesting consequences.

(Quick definition: "doomsday cult" refers to a religion that expects the end of the world as we know it, and soon. When I say Christianity began as a doomsday cult, I mean that most early Christians expected the return of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the beginning of a new world, within their lifetimes. I use the term in a descriptive sense, not a disparaging one: the earliest Christians expected, eagerly, the end of time, and acted accordingly.)

One obvious consequence of this is the shape of the New Testament itself. Its earliest documents are not treatises laying out a systematic theology of a new religion, but ad hoc letters from early church leaders, especially the apostle Paul, providing solutions to the particular problems of individual churches (these are books like 1 and 2 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans). Paul and his compatriots saw their mission as incredibly urgent—gotta tell as many as we can about Jesus before he comes back!—and they had no time for such detailed projects as systematic theology. After Paul's death, letters were composed in Paul's name (and that of other church leaders, like Peter) by his followers, that started to fill in the gaps in his teachings and wrestle with the delay in Christ's coming (these are books like 1 and 2 Timothy and Ephesians). Finally, recognizing that the end might be a little further off than they'd initially thought, Christians collected stories about Jesus himself and shaped them into narratives that could be used to instruct future generations (the gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).

Sometimes, the consequences of early Christian apocalypticism are more subtle than this, at least to modern Christians like me, with little knowledge of early Christian history. One fascinating example: early Christian thought about sex, especially abstinence.

When modern Christians talk about sexual abstinence, it is usually to demand it from either (1) people who ain't married yet or (2) priests and members of certain religious orders. It is not, typically, a practice of ordinary lay people. In this, early Christianity and modern Christianity are distinct.

In general, it's best not to mess with nuns.

Many early Christians chose to become or remain completely chaste for the duration of their lives. While some Christians today choose lifelong chastity as part of their calling to service in a religious order, these early believers predated such Christian institutions as monks, nuns, and even, perhaps, priests. The reasons they chose chastity are complex, but here are a few:

1. As an expression of radical Christian equality: Christian communities were incredibly diverse: people of distinct social class, gender, and social freedom were all admitted, and faced challenges in creating unity among themselves. Christians believed they were supposed to be "one body," that they were a community of "neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male or female." Some sought to create this unity by deconstructing social structures like marriage and slavery, and instead tried to live together as one, equal body, renouncing sex. "Only by dissolving the household was it possible to achieve the priceless transparency associated with a new creation," as Peter Brown puts it in The Body and Society, (pg 53). (It is likely that this was what some of the Corinthians were doing when Paul wrote 1 Corinthians; more on that in a moment.)
2. As a way of achieving high spiritual status: In an opposite impulse from the previous one, some sought spiritual excellence and even fame through abstinence. Most early Christians thought of complete sexual abstinence as better than sex within marriage, because they associated sex with the weakness of the human body and its associated temptations.* So living completely sex-free was, in a way, spiritually glamorous.
3. As an announcement of (or preparation for) the return of Christ: Today, society is dealing with the consequences of advances in medicine and food technology that have led to rapid population growth, to the extent that humanity is straining the earth's capacity to hold us. It wasn't always like this, though: the Roman Empire's death rate was such that, just to keep society from collapsing, every woman needed to give birth an average of five times.** So complete sexual renunciation was actually a direct threat to society, a refusal a key social obligation, which pointed to the immanent total re-arrangement and renewal of society at Christ's return.

Complete abstinence from sex was seemingly a part of Christianity from the start, so much so that Paul had to address it in one of the earliest known pieces of Christian writing, his first letter to the Corinthians. What's interesting about the early church in Corinth is that part of it was interested in complete abstinence, and part of it wanted the opposite. Some insisted that "all things are lawful for me," on the grounds that God's grace could be counted upon to cover their sins. In his letter, Paul had to mediate: "Between those who said, 'All things are lawful for me' and others who insisted 'It is well for a man not to touch a woman,' Paul sought a defensible middle ground" (From Shame to Sin, Kyle Harper, pg 88). Paul's solution was to have surprising consequences, not least because it was a temporary solution, created with the understanding that the problems it addressed would soon be swept away by Christ's return.

The "libertines" (the Corinthian faction who said "all things are lawful for me") were probably not interested in crazed orgies or depraved sex acts, but in participating in the normative sexual ethics of the Roman empire—men were expected to have some measure sexual self-control, but were allowed to have sex with prostitutes (or, if they were wealthy, with their slaves). On the opposite side were a group of Corinthians who believed that strict abstinence "was the measure of holiness" (Harper, pg 92). Paul's middle ground between the two is this: (1) don't have sex with prostitutes, (2) it's okay to be married, so that you aren't tempted as much to have sex outside of marriage, but (3) he wishes that everyone could abstain completely from sex—but recognizes that celibacy is a gift.

What Paul wants is to unite the divided Corinthians so that they can get back to the work of bringing people to Christ. He is interested neither in a radically egalitarian, celibate commune (because this would be unlikely to draw new members) nor in adherence to Roman sexual codes (which he and most other early Christians saw as sinful.) His goal is certainly not to set a sexual standard for the rest of Christian history: not only is he explicit that his advice on sex is a temporary measure made in view of "the coming crisis," but he even makes it clear that his advice is just that: advice, not a divine commandment.

This does not stop the early church from developing Paul's words in 1 Corinthians into a full-blown sexual ethic, however. In the centuries that follow, many Christians will conclude on the grounds of 1 Corinthians that sexual abstinence is morally superior to marital sex; some will retreat to the desert for a life of asceticism, others will live by example in the cities, and a few will even insist that marriage or sex of any kind is completely wrong. While these views of sex and abstinence will start to shift dramatically with the advent of Protestantism, there will still be resurgences of the more radical older views.

All of this is a direct consequence of the early Christian belief that Jesus was returning soon. Many Christians still believe this, and while I think that's a belief that's worth examining, what I think is more worth examining is what parts of our faith are the direct result of inhabiting this apocalyptic worldview from the start.

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*This attitude vis-à-vis marriage and chastity—that is, that chastity was morally superior to marital sex—held sway in the Catholic church for a long time; it was one of the things the Puritans objected to about Catholicism, because they were all about sex (within marriage, naturally). Have I mentioned that I love the Puritans, like, mostly unironically?
**This is about the birth rate of modern Kenya. By comparison, the US birth rate is about 2 births per woman (source). Keep in mind that in both of these places, it is easier to give birth without dying than it was in ancient Rome.

Photo sources:
1. A modification of this, which I've been unable to find an original source for.
2. lucyfrench123
3. Luz Adriana Villa