Monday, 4 March 2019

100% Christians.

Clouds seen from my balcony.

I have made the mistake of judging who is a Christian or not. I have thought or said, “Well, they can’t be a Christian if they did or said that.” It is really an awful thing to think that I am the judge of the world, but I used to.

I recently read the following excerpt from the book, Mere Christianity, by C.S.Lewis. I thought it explained exactly how our thoughts should be of people. It is so natural for humans to judge other humans. We do this on how they look, what they say and how they live. And it is actually important we do that in perhaps the workplace or when choosing friends or a partner in life, but not when we think of God’s work on the human heart. Here is the excerpt:

“The world does not consist of 100% Christians and 100% non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen (preachers). There are other people slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so. There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ but who are so strongly attracted to him that they are his in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand.

There are people in other religions who are being led by God’s secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it. For example, a Buddhist of good will may be led to concentrate more and more on the Buddhist teaching about mercy and to leave in the background (though he might still say he believed) the Buddhist teaching on certain other points.

Many of the good Pagans long before Christ’s birth may have been in this position. And always, of course, there are a great many people who are just confused in mind and have a lot of inconsistent beliefs all jumbled up together.
                                                                                                                          
Consequently, it is not much use trying to make judgements about Christians and non-Christians in the mass. It is some use comparing cats and dogs, or even men and women, in the mass because there one knows definitely which is which. Also, an animal does not turn (either slowly or suddenly) from a dog into a cat. But when we are comparing Christians in general with non-Christians in general, we are usually not thinking about real people whom we know at all, but only about two vague ideas  which we have gotten from novels and newspapers.”