An Agnostic's Look at The Bible - Part XVIII - Christians Calling Other Christians Not-Christian

Growing up I didn't think too much about other Christians and what they believed, or whether they were "real" Christians. I was raised in the Catholic Church, which definitely teaches that it's the "One True Church", but it wasn't something that came up in everyday conversation. In my teens I became aware of the Protestant Churches in my neighborhood and attended their services out of curiosity. This disturbed my parents, but I didn't detect anything very different. It wasn't until I got involved in The Way that I was exposed to the idea that some Christians didn't think some other Christians were...Christians.

I'm not talking about one Christian judging another Christian's behavior as unchristian, but a characterization of another Christian denomination as being fundamentally outside what the Bible would define as Christian. I've written much about The Way's cultishness, but their attitudes about how one would define a "true" Christian was right in line with conservative Protestant thinking. The thinking that fueled the engine of the European religious wars of the 1600 and 1700's had definitely not gone away. Catholics viewed Protestants as deluded schismatics and Protestants viewed Catholics as Mary worshipping papists. In the nineties my ex-wife and I were home schooling our children and purchased some textbooks from a Christian book publisher. I clearly remember the description in a history textbook of Catholics as a "false religion". 

I mostly hear these accusations of Christians not being real Christians mostly in a political context. Supporters of both major presidential candidates are sure that no Christian could truly support the other candidate. Abortion is a major theme in this flinging of heretical epithets, but even something as ordinary as clapping back at hecklers becomes "evidence" that a candidate hates Christians. In the political realm it's not so much suspect doctrine that gets one viewed as outside the pale, but the assumption that God is without a doubt on one side. 

This is not something new. The New Testament Epistles are full of references to "false teachers" who are accused of leading people astray and even being diabolic influences. Who are these allegedly false teachers? They weren't pagan priests or Jewish rabbis, they were other Christian leaders! Of course, since history is written by the victors, we don't see what the non-Christian Christians of the First Century had to say, but you can bet that they were writing the same things about the eventual authors of the epistles that the epistle writers were saying about them. Even past the era when what we now know as The Bible was written there was a constant battle among different factions of Christians to decide what the truth was. There was a constantly evolving opinion about various topics about which the Bible was unclear. Why? Because the Bible was unclear.

And other than politicians disingenuously promoting themselves as the only Christian alternative, the reason that regular Christians can confidently conclude that what they believe is the truth while other people are deluded fools or shills for Satan is that the Bible is (1) Unclear (2) Internally contradictory and (3) Not a concise doctrinal statement. The Bible is not a manifesto laying out a clear statement of beliefs and clarifying all manner of moral and practical conundrums, it is a loose collection of biographies (which contradict each other) and letters addressing behavioral problems in specific places. 

In order to make sense out of it a Christian is required to cherry pick, ignore the contradictions and parts that they don't like and interpret the ambiguous sections in a way that props up their own morality. Then decide that any other view is not just wrong, but inspired by The Devil.