By Bill Leonard
Who is a Christian, who is not and how do you know? That question, as old as the church, lurks inside St. Paul’s confrontation with the “superlative apostles” in Corinth who challenged his Christian credentials. In defending his own faith, Paul wrote “we do not go hawking the word of God about, as so many do.” (2 Corinthians 2:17).
Two thousand years later, as American presidential politics and accompanying culture wars heat up, perhaps we Christians could consider this modest proposal: While conscience may compel us to debate issues of injustice and ethics in the public square, might we at least agree to avoid all media-generated speculation as to the salvation of other Christians we know or know of?
I offer this suggestion after watching Franklin Graham, son of America’s most prominent evangelist, affix his evangelistic imprimatur to certain presidential candidates in this year’s election.
In an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe (rather early for serious theological dialogue) Graham was asked to evaluate the Christian commitment of the president of the United States. He began by saying that, “He has said he is a Christian, so I just have to assume that he is.”
While Graham acknowledged that he really “cannot answer that question for anybody,” by the interview’s end he had affirmed the Christian profession of two current Republican presidential candidates while denying it to their Mormon counterpart.
Even his views of the president’s faith became increasingly nebulous, as he noted: “All I know is under Obama … the Muslims of the world, he seems to be more concerned about them than the Christians murdered in the Muslim world.”
Responding to the controversy his remarks created, Graham finally admitted to another interviewer: “The president has said that he is a Christian, just leave it at that … only God knows the heart of all of these candidates.”
As Christians, might we agree that such sound bite salvation is unbecoming to a church that takes conversion seriously in all its intensity and complexity within the body of Christ? Concerns about the veracity of faith commitments in the lives of specific individuals — famous, infamous or unknown — should be received within the community of faith, not on Morning Joe.
While the dictates of conscience may divide us on theological and political opinions alike, we would do well to leave speculation about another’s salvation to conversations inside the communion of saints. Otherwise, we promote a salvific superficiality that trivializes the gospel to the “world,” offering shallow statements like those that Mark Twain described as “a minimum of sound to a maximum of sense.”
Implicitly or explicitly, all Christian communions seek to confirm faith within the believing community. Take Baptists, for example. An identifying mark of that historic tradition was the idea of a believers’ church in which membership required a confession of personal faith in Christ. Once such a confession was made, the congregation voted on its authenticity, sending would-be converts back to Jesus if their professions seemed questionable. It was a communal, churchly effort to authenticate individual salvation. (If they voted you in, they could also vote you out if faith seemed faulty.)
Whatever our Christian heritage, can we resist sound-bite salvation in both the world and the church? Why?
First, because redemption is God’s doing, not the work of human beings. Assessing the salvation of others may have more to do with our ideological biases than whether we know anything about their regeneration. God is the author of salvation; best to know where the boundaries are.
Second, Christian faith is a communal experience that unites us with those who have gone before and those who join us on the journey. Conjectures about the faith commitment of professing Christians, in the “worldly” environment of cable television, undermines communal relationships.
Third, it sounds so arrogant, implying that certain individuals are able to judge the salvation of others in a media-minute, thus cheapening Christianity’s public witness.
Fourth, in the Gospels Jesus always seems to turn the guesswork of salvation on its head. In sermon and story Jesus reminds his most pious listeners that “tax-gatherers and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you” (Matt. 21:31). Time after time, the people who think they know who is saved and who isn’t are shocked when those farthest from grace wind up being the line leaders.
So if the folks on Morning Joe or any other cable news outlet ask any of us Christians to speculate on somebody else’s eternal salvation, let’s give them this gospel sound bite: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not the result of works, so that no one may boast” (Eph 2:8-9). Then, for Jesus sake, let’s shut up.