Over the course of blogging I have found myself more than once being labeled as arrogant, close-minded, narrow-minded, bigoted, insensitive, judgmental and nearly everything in between. Sometimes this takes place in the comments and other times I receive e-mails. If they come in the form of a blog comment, I generally try to pass them along for you to read. I post critical as well as comments.

Yet, however the comments come, the issue is generally the same: I believe in Orthodoxy. That means that I believe there are certain key beliefs, without which, you are not a Christian. If you do not believe in the full deity of Jesus Christ, you are not a Christian. This, by necessity, means that you believe in The Trinity. If you do not, you are not a Christian. You may have a high view of Jesus, but you are not a Christian in any sense anyone within traditional church history has understood or used the term. These two points in particular, the deity of Christ and the Trinity have been a stumbling block for some readers over the years. The response is that, though they don’t hold these doctrines, they are, nonetheless, still “Christians” and I have no right to say otherwise.

The other day I was reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and came across a passage I had read before but forgotten about in which Lewis masterfully answers this objection who “who are you to say who is and who is not a Christian?” He does so much better than I, so please bear with an extended quote from Lewis (italics original):

People ask: “Who are you, to lay down who is, and who is not a Christian?” or “May not many a man who cannot believe these doctrines be far more truly a Christian, far closer to the spirit of Christ, than some who who?” Now this objection is in one sense very right, very charitable, very spiritual, very sensitive. It has every amiable quality except that of being useful. We simply cannot, without disaster, use language as these objectors want us to use it. I will try to make this clear by the history of another, and very much less important word.

The word gentleman originally meant something recognisable; one who had a coat of arms and some landed property. When you called someone “a gentleman” you were not paying him a compliment, but merely stating a fact. If you said he was not “a gentleman” you were not insulting him, but giving information. There was no contradiction in saying that John was a liar and a gentleman; any more than there is now in saying that James is a fool and an M.A. But then there came people who said -so rightly, charitably, spiritually, sensitively, so anything but usefully- “Ah, but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour? Surely he is the true gentleman who behaves as a gentleman should? Surely in that sense Edward is far more truly a gentleman than John?” They meant well. To be honourable and courteous and brave is of course a far better thing than to have a coat of arms. But it is not the same thing. Worse still, it is not a thing everyone will agree about. To call a man “a gentleman” in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is “a gentleman” becomes simply a way of insulting him. When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker’s attitude to that object. (A “nice” meal only means a meal the speaker likes.) A gentleman, once it has been spiritualized and refined out of its old coarse, objective sense, means hardly more than a man whom the speaker likes. As a result, gentleman is now a useless word. We had lots of terms of approval already, so it was not needed for that use; on the other hand if anyone (say, in a historical work) wants to use it in its old sense, he cannot do so without explanations. It has been spoiled for that purpose.

Now if once we allow people to start spiritualizing and refining, or as they might say “deepening,” the sense of the word Christian, it too will speedily become a useless word. In the first place, Christians themselves will never be able to apply it to anyone. It is not for us to say who, in this deepest sense, is or is not close to the spirit of Christ. We do not see into men’s hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge. It would be wicked arrogance for us to say that any man, is or is not, a Christian in this refined sense. And obviously a word which we can never apply is not going to be a very useful word.

• Read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
• Read Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense by N.T. Wright
• Read The Reason For God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Tim Keller