Sorry for calling Christians rude names, my conclusion is: Be gracious to other Christians, but do not automatically trust them

You know what?  For a while now, months if not years, guilt has been eating up at me regarding a post that I made earlier, on my Bible blog I believe. In this guilt-inducing post, I came out and used the most unsavoury terms to describe my fellow Christians. Admittedly I have written many such posts. However this particular truly involved the most unsavoury terms imaginable! Obviously from the moment I wrote it I knew it was wrong and inappropriate to describe my fellow Christians in this way, or indeed anyone else.  And yet I have stubbornly refused to correct it until now, because, well they are – utterly dreadful, and for me to say it as it is, was just an honest expression of candour. (Also Jesus describes the Pharisees in similarly unflattering terms, when He calls them “whitewashed tombs”)  However, Jesus of course has special dispensation to use such terms, being God Himself, whereas I am not God. So here I am going to finally apologise for using such unsavoury terms.  You know what, I was thinking about this, and here are the thoughts I have come up with.
On one hand, these people are unsavoury, no doubt about it, they do have poor character. On the other hand, as a fellow Christian I still have to be gracious towards them. But, and this is huge, it is worth bearing the following in mind:

The Bible, specifically the New Testament, and the Epistles most of all, was written with the expectation that Christians would take God and the Bible itself very very seriously. Remember that the Epistles were written in real time to people who often risked their life for the Gospel. Many 1st Century Christians actually died for this faith. So we can accept that these Christians took this thing very seriously. So there are certain instructions and so on that the writers of the Epistles give, that make sense in that kind of all-or-nothing environment, where people were literally risking their lives for this Gospel.  There is a way that you can afford to trust people and trust in their sincerity, if they are literally giving their everything, even their lives. The fact is that we in the West no longer don’t currently live in that kind of environment where we have to risk our lives for the Gospel. So we cannot necessarily trust that everyone around us in Church is characterised by utmost sincerity.  So it does not make sense to trust them in the same way. And this is what I have discovered time and time again in Church.  People will pay all the lip service in the world to God and His word. However, they don’t “have skin in the game” the way our 1st Century “brothers and sisters” did. So of course someone in our times, in the West can afford to make all kinds of professions about their commitment to God if they know it will never realistically cost them anything, much less their lives. (Things are different in other countries where even in the 21st Century Christians do risk their lives to profess faith in Christ.) So it just does not make sense to trust in the sincerity of modern, Western Christians the same way we would have done if we lived in the First Century.  So the conclusion I have been able to draw is this:  Even if people are not as sincere as First Century Christians would have been, we still need to be gracious to one another, and not call one another unsavoury names (no matter how seemingly deserved.) The Church still needs to be welcome and open to everyone no matter how demonstrably insincere they might be. This is how grace works. However, for the sake of prudence, I am henceforth going to keep a far distance from every single individual until they have conclusively proven their character.  This is why I believe that some instructions in the Bible (regarding interaction with other Christians) just don’t “work” for our times, that is, by obeying them you are just opening yourself to pain and hurt, because they were written assuming an earth-shattering level of sincerity, until death.  The basic principle is correct, of course “Love one another”, but to follow the first century application would be frankly unwise and or open yourself up to exploitation.  I am not suggesting that because of this, you should disobey the Bible. Rather, I would suggest that you continue to obey it, applying a lot of prudence and caution.

You know what?  This is also relevant to marriage. There are some instructions in the Bible which to me assume a stupendous level of sincerity from both husband and wife.  For instance, in Ephesians 5v24, the Bible instructs women to submit to their husbands “in everything, as unto the Lord.”  If the husband was using every whit of his effort to strive to be holy, to be like Jesus, to walk in truth, love etc, then it might be plausible, if difficult for a woman to commit to submit to him.  As it is, looking around at the non-fantastic calibre of Christian men that I have met, my own response is a big fat “nope”!  And that is the polite version.  I still plan to submit to my husband, in obedience to the Bible, if I do get married. That is the obedience part. However, I am looking to make sure that the man I marry is worth this level of submission.  That is the prudence part. From all the (non) wonderful “Christians” I have met, not a single one of them is even almost worthy of this level of submission – except my own amazing father (and others of his generation), and one man of my generation who was so deep in Christ, so steeped in prayer, in such relentless pursuit of Christlikeness that it was breathtaking – and he was already married. So in our days it is so rare to meet someone who is walking in this level of holiness, that it is essentially implausible, and purely because of this, I am essentially resigned to the prospect of lifelong singleness. To make matters worse, many Christian men apparently expect automatic submission from me anyway, regardless of marriage – I mean, even though I am not married to them, and realistically never will be. Because wives are supposed to submit to husbands, that apparently establishes a “broad principle” that women should generally submit to men. Yeah, but that assumes that the men in question are walking in sufficient commitment to Christ to be worthy of submission, which frankly almost none of you are, dear brothers!  Whereas I imagine that in the First Century a sufficiently large proportion of Christian men would have been clearly walking in this level of commitment, to make marriage a viable and realistic prospect for the First Century equivalent of myself. People always insinuate that I am asking too much, by insisting on a husband who is actually striving to be like Christ.  And then they equally insinuate that I am asking too much when I ask for a whole church where people are also striving to be like Christ.  And I guess that they are right, of course – if I cannot find a single man who is like this, then what are the chances of finding a whole church?!

(To talk further about this female-to-male submission thing, I have met some men who did not even bother to hide their smugness, because they apparently thought that they could essentially just tell me what to do, and I would have no choice but to obey. Erm, do you honestly not grasp that my submission to my husband, and indeed any man, must be dependent on the level of his sincerity?  Otherwise, from what you suggesting I may as well just go into any gathering that calls itself a Church, regardless of sincerity, and offer my automatic submission to anyone who calls himself a Christian/Pastor, again regardless of sincerity?  If it is not plausible to do this to just anyone, then it is not plausible to do it with anyone, and the alternative is to evaluate your character to make sure that you are sufficiently steeped in Christian sincerity to request submission.  Furthermore the Bible instructs us to “Test the spirits”. Are you suggesting that that is relevant for anyone other scenario in the Church, except, when it comes to a woman’s automatic submission to a random man?  So you would expect to “test the spirit” of the pastor before submitting to him, but you would expect me to just automatically submit to you, without testing your spirit, because you are a man?  Because frankly I have tested your spirit, and I have found you very wanting…That almost turned into a rant there!)  Also, you know what, the truth is that because there is simply no church I have come across that looks like a First Century church/what a church should look like, the most prudent thing to do would be to avoid getting overly involved in any of them. When you start getting deeply involved, people start expecting things from you. So instead of going to every Sunday service plus midweek meetings, I am learning to drastically dial back my involvement. And if the pastor tries to pressurise me to give more commitment, even after I have tried to diplomatically explain my reasoning, (as many of them will try to do) then I will simply just leave altogether.

To finish off, and to illustrate why it can be so dangerous to trust other “Christians”, I will refer to this story that I have just read. (I don’t know whether I have made the point that it is precisely because you need people to trust that many people turn to the Church, and speaking for myself, in the past I have tended to extend an automatic trust to people because they are Christians. But the point I am trying to make in this whole essay is that people in the Western Church in our days are no more trustworthy than anyone else. Christians in our times are not particularly steeped in Christ, in righteousness, truth, or holiness or anything that should supposedly characterise Christians.  So if you would not trust a random individual regarding a particular issue, then frankly, from my experience it would be unwise to trust a Christian either.)

Anyway, here is the rough outline of the story.  I don’t want to link to the story, or talk about it in too much detail, because it is actually very bad.
Anyway, the story involves two ladies, both supposedly churchgoers.  Lady 1 decided to trust Lady 2 regarding a large sum of money. However she apparently changed her mind, the two of them had an argument, and the story tragically ends with Lady 1 being dead, allegedly at the hands of Lady 2. And the details are somewhat gruesome. And remember that these are both Christians. In fact, Lady 2, the alleged murderer, is supposedly a devout Christian. And furthermore, these are both women where most people who commit crazy murders like this are indisputably male. So this story illustrates to me why you can’t afford to trust just anyone just because you meet them in church.  Even a nice, seemingly sweet lady.

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