In the first place the situation in the actual world is much more complicated than that. The world does not consist of 100 per cent Christians and 100 per cent 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. There are other people who are 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 by 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….Many of the good Pagans long before Christ’s birth many 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 judgments 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 of real people whom we know at all, but only two vague ideas which we have got reading novels and newspapers. If you want to compare the bad Christian and the good Atheist, you must think about two real specimens whom you have actually met. Unless we come down to brass tacks in that way, we shall only be wasting time.

• C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Ch 10, “Nice People or New Men.”

This paragraph of Mere Christianity brought into sharp focus something that had been hiding away in my mind for some time: Christians have entirely too much to say about the subject of who is and who isn’t a Christian. One of the largest barriers to the communication of the Gospel to our culture may very well turn out to be our obsessive need to be all-knowing on who is and who is not a Christian.

An important question for me as a Bible teacher and communicator is “How does the Bible address us?” Does the Bible speak to all people or only to God’s people? Or does it speak to all of us as both being in and outside of a right relationship with God?

If God speaks to us both as sinners and as members of God’s family/the church, what happens when we communicate as those who are “in” directing those who are “out” how to become like us?

Lewis isn’t buying into some kind of Kierkegaardian refusal to use the term “Christian” about one’s self or others. What he is suggesting is that some kinds of certainty about where a person is in terms of personal faith may be very difficult to attain or apply. There are simply so many qualifiers and factors to be taken into consideration, simple objectivity can be anything but simple.

Of course, I can hear pages furiously turning now. Aren’t the marks of a true believer everywhere in the Bible? Shouldn’t any good preacher or teacher able to cover those passages with confidence? Aren’t there many books to be written on the “Marks of a True Believer?”

It is true that scripture gives us many descriptions of true believers and these descriptions are useful and practical. The problem isn’t the description. It’s how much of our human fallenness and imperfection co-exists alongside those definitions. And make no mistake about it: our imperfection, sinfulness and humanness is an implication and a factor in every statement the Bible makes to us about the “true” believer.

I don’t despair of the truth of any statement the Bible makes about real Christians, but when I hear the confident announcement by any group of self-proclaimed Christians telling the rest of us what we must do to be “the real deal” like they are, I always feel like I’m in the presence of a monumental failure of honestly.

• Is the law written in my heart?
• Do I love God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength?
• Do I love my neighbor as myself?
• Do I live by the Spirit?
• Do I love the brothers?
• Do I kill sin?
• Do I repent?
• Do I believe?
• Do I die to self?
• Do I follow Jesus?
• Do I love Jesus more than the world? More than family and loved ones? More than life itself?
• Is Jesus my treasure?
• Do I delight in him above all else?
• Do I obey his commandments?
• Do I treat suffering people as if they were Christ himself?
• Do I believe, and not doubt?
• Is my faith working through love?
• Do I forgive others as God forgives me?
• Am I holy?

I’ve always found that discussions of these subjects tends to make many Christians — especially many evangelicals with major league theologies of conversion in tow — into a bunch of prevaricating spouters of the most embarrassing doubletalk. I can’t think of another group of people who, in such large numbers, would defend the idea that they are really, actually doing the things that the Bible says PERFECTLY, IDEALLY define what it means to be a Christian. By the time the average Bible study finishes with these qualifiers, you understand why Bill Clinton thought “it all depends on what “is” is” made sense.

For example, take a baseball team. As the coach says, it’s a simple game. You throw the ball. You catch the ball. You hit the ball. Now on any team I’ve ever known (and this in a sport that lives by percentages and numbers) the players universally view themselves in the role of learners, improvers and followers after a perfection that they have not attained. They know that in a given game, they may play perfect, but in a given season, the averages will prevail. Baseball players are human, after all. The perfect game is imaginable, but itâ’s never played for more than a few short moments. The players are real, but the game they play is not the perfect game that it’s possible to play.

Of course, the life of faith isn’t sports. (Forgive the metaphor.) But we are not perfect believers. We’re imperfect disciples. And every time scripture says “Love your wife as Christ loved the church,” I’m aware of three things: I haven’t; I have enough to know it’s the best way; I want to more than I do; always if possible.

So it is with being a Christian. I am one. I want to be one. I’m deeply aware of how often Iâ’m not one. Simul justus et peccator and several other things.

Lewis suggests that we not put so much emphasis on the kind of certainty that has everyone labeled and located. I’d love to know what he’d have to say about those who constantly scour the scriptures to find more conditions that describe the true believer, and then use those same scriptures to separate themselves — the obvious people getting it right — in contrast to the rest of the hoi polloi. It’s as of we’ve out-Phariseed the Pharisees in our ability to mark out the real believer from the “sinner.” (Leave it to Paul to say that a real Jew is one inwardly, not outwardly.)

The life of grace recognizes there is an ideal in Jesus Christ. Jesus perfectly conveys God’s character, God’s law and God’s plan for human beings. None of those sharp edges are dulled in the Gospel, but the word of the Gospel is grace. The word of transformation is grace. The word of discipleship is grace.

This business of defining large numbers of people out of the faith by our favorite qualifiers is a nasty piece of hypocrisy we need to give up. When scripture says we must be born again, our response isn’t “Obviously, I have.” When scripture says obey his commandments, our response isn’t “That’s me.” When scripture says Love as he loved, we say “Christ have mercy.”

The problem for many people is their desire to create a church of certainty more than a church of Jesus. On the other side of baptism and the Lord’s Table they want something that is never found in the pages of the New Testament. The churches of the New Testament, like Jesus’ parable, are a mixture of wheat and tares. Church discipline does not happen out at the perimeter, but near the center, where Paul understands the power of inclusion and exclusion will do the most good in making us like Jesus. Where the sharp edges of distinction need to be understood is by those who openly claim to be following Jesus in a relationship of community and accountability.

Disciples desire the integrity of accountability because it keeps us real and destroys our phoniness. But an excessive, isolating interest in distinctions doesn’t have the approval of Jesus.”He who is not against me is for me.” Our resemblance to Christ — and the ideal picture of the Christian — is inconsistent and incomplete.

I am a Christian, but I understand my Christian faith as a process of finding my life in Jesus. It is a process for the imperfect, the failing and the broken. It is not an invitation to say (or endlessly sing) “Look at me, look at what I am and look at what I am doing.” It is, instead, a life where graces allows us to say “Look at the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Look at him and what he has done, is doing and will do.”