Wednesday, April 28, 2010

There Are No Christians

...if we can say that there are some Catholics who are Christians, can we not equally say that there are some Evangelicals who are Christians? Or perhaps better still, shouldn’t we simply leave the judging to the One who will judge justly? If we don’t, then where will the madness end? Calvinists will admit that some Armenians are Christians, hyper-Calvinists will concede that some Calvinists are Christians, and so on until eventually we’ll have a denomination of Christianity that claims there are actually no Christians at all...

Little did I know when I wrote this that Karl Barth, through his commentary on Romans, has already begun this peculiar denomination of Christianity:

Rightly understood, there are no Christians: there is only the eternal opportunity of becoming Christians - an opportunity at once accessible and inaccessible to all men.

I wrote about this potential with exasperation, but maybe this Barth fellow has a point.

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