I don’t think so. After accepting Christ as your savior, you must grow into one. What do you think?
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Funny this question came up today. My answer is if someone accepts Christ on their deathbed and dies before they have a chance to grow do they go to heaven? If a young child dies before they are capable of accepting Christ do they go to heaven?
If you look at what Jesus actually said on the subject the only requirement is to believe.
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Welcome to the forum! I am sure there are lots of different opinions, with scriptural support for most. I personally think you can, as it is a heart change but if you continue to live, that heart change will show fruit. I also think it valid that you can grow into Christianity gradually, whether from childhood or as an adult, but again the attitude of the heart is paramount. One area I am quite ambivalent about, is the type of “household” conversions to Christianity spoke of in the Bible in Acts 16 and elsewhere. I am not sure how that works and what I am missing, so open to learning.
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In denominations that expect people to submit to the rule of Jesus personally, the dominant interpretation is that when a person believes and then confesses the faith, (s)he is saved. The basic idea is that the person went through the Jesus door to the road that is Jesus. Anyone on the Jesus road has the status of being saved, no matter how much or little the person knows.
This interpretation is a crude simplification as it hides the process that lead to the decision and the journey after the decision. It may take years, even decades, before the person moves from hearing the gospel to believing it. The apparent decision to submit to the rule of Jesus is just the visible top of a long process.
The spiritual growth after being transferred to the Jesus road is called sanctification. It is expected from all believers but it is not an absolute demand to being saved (becoming a true Christian). The saving mercy of God is that we are saved through faith, not through our works, knowledge or any other accomplishments.
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I guess that it depends on your definition of “Christian”?
Is a Christian someone who accepts the basic principles of Christianity? If so, then the answer must be yes.
Is a Christian someone who follows through on their beleifs? If so then the answer is No.
But, like most things that is the extreme options. Black & white. Yes or No. Christian or not. Little in this life is so cut and dried or precise.
If a drop of water falls onto you are you now wet?
Technically yes, but in reality you would not think so. Now think of the complexity of Christianity.
Richard
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I agree that the word ‘Christian’ may be used in different ways, so the answer does depend on your definition of ‘Christian’. If it is used as something telling about a membership in a Christian denomination, the answer is different than if we use it as a synonym of ‘believer’, ‘disciple of Jesus’ or ‘a child of God’. I prefer the original meaning, being a believing follower of Jesus, saved through the mercy of God.
Are you married - yes, no, or a bit? This was a rhetorical question that intends to show that there are matters where the answer should be yes or no. The current era has become so confused that many might not be certain of the answer. Am I married or not? - well that depends…
I am an old-fashioned Christian and I could look from the official records whether the person has the status of being married or not. Whether someone is a true Christian cannot be seen from the official records of humans but I believe that there is just a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ dichotomy in the heavenly records.
One complicating thing is that we humans are eager to add conditions to being saved. If you belong to our denomination and not protestant/catholic/[pick your choice], then you are saved. If you follow these rules, then you are saved, otherwise not. Many more conditions could be added.
The common feature of these conditions is that faith and the saving mercy of God are not enough, you have to [pick your choice] to be accepted as a saved Christian. Being saved becomes an achievement of the person, although religious expressions may be added to camouflage the demands as the mercy of God.
If your definition is anyone “saved” by God you may find that it includes mre than you think. We cannot second guess who God “saves”. Not even by Scripture! In fact we are told this by scripture itself.
Precisely. We presume to know what God is going to do.
Christianity is not just about salvation. It is a way of life. That is the meaning of discipleship.
Metihnks your definition of Christianity is too small.
Richard
Salvation may sometimes be understood in a too narrow sense. We are speaking about a change in location, from outside (darkness) to being located ‘in Christ’. In Christ, we live within the Kingdom of God. So yes, being a true Christian is not about a one-time decision, membership, or hobby. It is living in the Kingdom of God as a child of God.
Living as a Christian is living in the tension between ‘already’ and ‘not yet’. We live as children of God in the Kingdom of God and, at the same time, as fallible humans waiting for the Kingdom to come in a visible way. What others see in us is most often the fallible human. That is why it is not always evident who is a true Christian and who is not. God knows who belongs to Him and we can leave the judgements to Him.
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The reason I posted the question, do you become a Christian overnight? was because I spoke to a woman in church who said you did and I disagreed with her. You can have the title of Christian over night but to become a “real” Christian takes years of growth.
Yes, that person will go to heaven. A child, before the age of reason, would go to heaven. But in the end I think it is going to be much different than we all have perceived. Do our parents who were’nt Christians go to heaven on account of us? The bible says He will wipe away every tear but if our families aren’t there, how could this be?
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I do not fully agree. If a child is born, it is a human although it takes years before it can behave as an adult human should behave. The same with being born from above: being born from above and growing to live as a Christian is expected to live are not the same.
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If you subscribe to some form of universalism then yes. There is an indication of whole families that were baptized based on the conversion of the parents but I read those as the whole family came to believe because of the parents witness.
Short answer, because we are made new. What this entails exactly we aren’t told. I have always imagined that we will be so in awe at being in the heavenly places that the cares of this world will just fade away.
The underlying question is why should it matter (to you)? If we are talking salvation then that is God’s domain pure and simple and not of our control.
That one gets an “ouch”
If you take Christ at His literal word human families are irrelevant. However, if you take God’s forgiveness as being unlimited then there is nothing to concern you. Christianity falls short when it comes to those who do not have membership, as in believe in Christ. The question would then be whether God forgives all, or just those who understand and accept the forgiveness from Christ’s death?
At this point I deviate from Traditional Christian doctrine. Whether I am right or wrong will only become clear when it is to late to change it.
Richard
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It’s different for different people. For a few it’s a sudden overnight thing. For probably the majority it’s how they were brought up. For some, including me, it’s something you gradually come to embrace after much thinking and reading over possibly many years.
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I’m always bothered by that wording because it seems to make salvation dependent on intellectual capability. I prefer to note with Luther (and Chrysostom) that it’s quite evident that little children can trust, its demonstrated when a wailing child will not be comforted by a stranger but quiets when picked up by the mother.
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It’s not just in Acts, it’s happened down through history to this day. In later Roman times, if the head of the household decided to commit to Christ, everyone including servants and slaves was thus committed as well and all would get baptized. In not quite so ancient times, if the ruler of some tribe decided Christianity was true, the entire tribe, down to infants, would commonly be baptized, and missionaries have related that the same is true of tribes in Africa and South America still.
C S Lewis sort of speaks to this when in one of the novels his main character makes the point that someone whose allegiance and trust rests in someone whose allegiance and trust rests in Christ, God will count it as allegiance to Christ It’s been compared to a feudal structure, but it’s really a chain of trust: I trust these people to get it right, so when they decide, I follow.
This is why the most ancient baptismal formulas we know of for infants the parents answer the questions in the infant’s place: the allegiance of the parents is considered to be the allegiance of the child until the child is old (and mature) enough to decide to change that allegiance. We don’t grasp that because we live in a society that is individualistic to an extreme, whereas the ancients saw everything in communal/relational perspective, and that’s the perspective in the Old Testament period as well: they didn’t see God saving individuals so much as communities, something that is reflected in the original wordings of the great Creeds – We believe, not I believe.
And it is not infrequently followed by later incidents when a person realizes there were reserved conditions attached to the original decision, and so “comes to Christ” again.
Paul says we are saved through πίστις (PISS-tiss), which cannot be separated from the idea of faithfulness and many argue should be rendered as “trusting faithfulness” or “trusting allegiance”. Seeing that, the whole faith-works thing collapses because it is impossible to not have “works” if one has allegiance. One of the second generation of Lutheran theologians noted this and chided colleagues who emphasized faith to the point of almost rejecting doing any good works at all!
A medieval thinker compared out faith in Christ to the faith of a tenant in his lord: the tenant who actually trusts his lord will do his utmost to make the land he tenants productive and useful – calling Christians “vassals of Christ” though by embracing being a vassal, not through contract. The point was that the trust/faith of a vassal is not merely saying, “Yes, you’re my legal lord”, but “Lord, I would be your vassal!” And while we may be good vassals or poor vassals (think of the parable of the talents/coins), what counts is that we are willing vassals.
That’s what I see the idea of baptism as something a person does to declare personal faith as doing, rather than it being something God does (and happens to borrow the hands of a mere human to carry out on the physical level). I like how Luther put it, that in baptism we do not have mere water, we have water bound to the Word of God – which is an entirely different creature than just water. [note that as he does frequently, Luther is playing with both most common meanings of “Word of God”, our Lord Himself and His words as we have them in the scriptures]
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So many people use that term but it really doesn’t come from scripture, it comes from the humanism that dominated much of the reformation in the sixteenth century. The ancient church’s conception was that until a child is old enough to take over management of his/her spiritual life, that child is “covered” by the faith of the parents; comparison was often made to the instance where Jesus saw the faith of the friends who just tore a hole in a house roof to get their friend to Jesus, and He forgave the sins of the man.
That question was asked in the early centuries as well and was put forth by more than a few as an argument that God would eventually save everyone.
I’ve heard it used more recently to argue that our pets will be there, too.
I cannot conceive of God being so cavalier with our love! Having us “happy” by washing away memories isn’t love, it’s brainwashing.
I met a gal who said she never thought of herself as a Christian and never decided to be one, she just realized one day when a friend asked if she believed in God that yes, in fact, she actually did! That of course led to the question of which God it was that she believed in, and after careful consideration she decided it was the God of the Bible, which meant she believed in Jesus.
Her “sinner’s prayer” wasn’t an “invitation to Jesus”, it was thanks for bringing her to that belief/trust.
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There is more common than we usually think between the saying ‘we are saved through faith’ and the note that there must be faith + works. Faith without acts is dead.
The main difference is that ‘we are saved through faith’ assumes that acts are a visible sign of faith and are not themselves needed for salvation. The ‘faith + works’ approach assumes that acts are not merely the sign of faith but something needed for salvation. In practice, there is not so much difference as in both alternatives we have both faith and acts.
I agree with what you wrote about ‘pistis’ in the sense that it includes the meaning ‘faithfulness’.
- Should one call oneself a Christian if one believes Jesus was crucified, died, was buried, was resurrected, and ascended into heaven, but doesn’t act like one consistently and daily?
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Well, as that mostly just implies that one is alive, I don’t think it makes a difference at the exact level stated. If one is habitually not acting like one, then one’s Christianity becomes rather more doubtful.
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