My Loved Ones Hate Jesus

[VladtheDestroyer]

Even the ones I thought were Christians.
They say they the Bible is bull crap
And I should not study it unless someone pays me to.
My own life has done me no good.

 

[Idolater]

Take heart. Surely even the most avowedly anti-Christian, atheist secularists in your family still hold to many distinctive and signature Christian morals. They believe in justice, due process of law, separation of powers, universal human rights and equality, and other things that come only from Christ and His Church. They are Christians in spite of their protestations I bet. To be truly anti-Christian is to be something like a Nazi, like a moral nihilist, like a Stalinist, like a monster. I bet you have many relatives who are implicitly iow, Christians, even if they don't appreciate where they inherited their moral sense from.

 

[JudgeRightly]

are Christians in spite of their protestations I bet.

You clearly don't understand what "being a Christian" means.

Being a Christian means that:

1. You believe God (the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Creator of the universe) exists.
2. You have a relationship with Him.
- under the New Covenant (not currently accessible), this means that you are part of a priestly nation whose God is the Lord, who (as a nation) believes that Christ is the Messiah.
- under Paul's dispensation of grace (currently accessible to anyone on earth), your relationship with Him is a personal one, your Lord and Savior.

@Clete has a far better breakdown of this, but this is an extremely high level view.

Being a Christian means that these people, who are

even the most avowedly anti-Christian, atheist secularists in your family

who

still hold to many distinctive and signature Christian morals

are by definition NOT Christians.

Which means this:

implicitly iow, Christians, even if they don't appreciate where they inherited their moral sense from.

Is false.

Holding to certain societal values does not make you Christian.

Having a relationship with God through the above dispensations makes you a Christian.

The societal values follow from that relationship. They do not come before it.

 

[Clete]

You clearly don't understand what "being a Christian" means.

Being a Christian means that:

1. You believe God (the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Creator of the universe) exists.
2. You have a relationship with Him.
- under the New Covenant (not currently accessible), this means that you are part of a priestly nation whose God is the Lord, who (as a nation) believes that Christ is the Messiah.
- under Paul's dispensation of grace (currently accessible to anyone on earth), your relationship with Him is a personal one, your Lord and Savior.

@Clete has a far better breakdown of this, but this is an extremely high level view.

Being a Christian means that these people, who are



who



are by definition NOT Christians.

Which means this:



Is false.

Holding to certain societal values does not make you Christian.

Having a relationship with God through the above dispensations makes you a Christian.

The societal values follow from that relationship. They do not come before it.

It seems like he is using the term "Christian" in a non-religious sense. He seems to be using it in a manner that is almost synonymous with "the West" or "Western society," as if the term "Christian" denotes a cultural way of thinking that stands apart from the faith that carries the same name.

That is not an entirely incorrect use of the term, but the problem is that he's too lazy with his writing for anyone to be able to tell for certain whether that's what he's doing. At best, presuming that he is using the term "Christian" in this cultural context, he seems oblivious to the fact that he's doing so on an overtly Christian website, where making the clarification would be most necessary to avoid confusion.

(In actual fact, what I suspect he's doing is parroting something he's been reading recently and isn't sharp enough to do so in a manner that converts the context of the book he's reading into something that fits an online discussion forum. I have no hard evidence of this, however. It's just a feeling.)

Further, what he is thinking of as "Christian morals" aren't Christian in their origin. C. S. Lewis famously made this point in The Abolition of Man, where he argues for the existence of objective moral values based on the fact that EVERYONE has basically the same set of morals. Every man, of every race, color, creed, country or culture knows that if anyone other than himself has sex with a woman who is his wife, a wrong has been committed. It makes no difference whether he's Christian or not. The most hardened, cruel, and immoral thief knows it's wrong to take things that don't belong to you. The proof is his reaction when someone takes something from him, even if that something is an object he stole from someone else. He doesn't have to have been raised in a Christian culture for this to be true. The Taoist burglar in China gets just as angry when his own house is broken into as does the church-going cowboy in West Texas when someone trespasses on his ranch. The whole human race is endowed with more or less the same sense of right and wrong.

As such, Idolater's point fails based on its own premises. It's just him seeing everything everywhere through his Catholic-colored glasses.