Somehow I did not receive notifications that people had replied in the thread. I apologize for my late response.
Joan wrote:if the friend is a Christian I'd still want to reason at least largely from the scriptures. Maybe not only from the scriptures, as you say, but they would be my first and last word. I spent many a discussion with the youth I mentioned, and learned to avoid being drawn into philosophical discussions that had no sound basis because they led us into sappy circles that never went anywhere. Even if not to Scripture, I had to keep taking us back to something concrete and sound, and reason from there.
I do not find it sufficient to use
only scripture. The battle for truth must be fought in the semantics/meaning/logic/philosophy areas just as strongly as in the source/authority/revelation ones. While I recognize that it is truly only the Holy Spirit that can convict men in their inner being, I am also a firm believer that men have diverse ways and inroads into themselves that can be effectively accessed by a Spirit-led person through ordinary means such as logic. Clear examples of this need are Christian Science, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Mormons. They all accept the Bible, but quoting scripture won't do the job because their problem is conceptual and interpretive. One has to address meaning with logic in order to correct their faulty presuppositions and world paradigm/framework or they will just apply their conceptual error to every verse and you will not have done any good.
Sometimes, I think the more philosophical discussions that Christians engage in with nonbelievers may serve primarily the purpose of
removing excuses (aka tearing down everything that sets itself up against God). However, once the excuses have been removed—which were serving as bastions of defense/islands of shelter for the resistant and militant soul—the person is more exposed and sensitive to the power of the Spirit. The intellect is not the primary place where spiritual change occurs, but it must always be in concert with that change and it can actively resist that change. Sophistry is real and often employed to purposefully deceive self and avoid the truths one wishes not to face. (I know this well for how I use it in my own life.)
Joan, the entire argument by Justin was supposedly based in Scripture. It was not a question of Justin not knowing any of the scriptures—he has undoubtedly read all the ones that could relate to homosexuality more than I have! Instead, the battle at this point is to draw out the
meaning of those. This cannot be done by just quoting more scriptures that he has already read and twisted into his framework. He needs an intellectual kick in the pants, an earthquake disturbing his concocted shelter that is protecting him from responding to the Spirit's prompting.
That it IS quicksand is true, but I Justin and my friend are the ones caught in it and that
by their own desire. They have their means of escape handy, a veritable stepladder already under their feet in the scripture they already know. It now takes conveying to them not the presence of the stepladder but the dire nature of the quicksand and how imminently it may engulf and kill their soul.
kaufmannphillips wrote:If your friend is persistently prideful, or covetous, or impatient, or uncharitable, would you feel that you "have to tell him that [you] cannot accept him calling himself a Christian and that ... [you] couldn't fellowship with him as a brother"?
... [this is] in a hypothetical context where Erik has already shared his mind with his friend, and the friend persists in their behavior afterwards.
... People rarely decide to be "prideful, or covetous, or impatient, or uncharitable" as a plain matter of personal policy. Rather, they decide to "preserve their dignity" or "actualize their potential" or "be a competitor" or "maximize efficacy" or "be realistic," etc. They quite likely would not stand for a policy of pridefulness or covetousness or impatience or uncharitability per se, like an advocate for homosexual marriage would stand for their policy.
There's a missing center in your situation: if a Christian brother is engaging in these sins, we are called on to confront him. Once we obey, this removes the ability for the person to sit comfortably inside his own twisted perception of his behavior, secure in a protected island of rationalization. The Spirit may act on His own to convict the person of sin, but it may be that the Spirit uses the correction of human agents to do so. Perhaps it is both much of the time (given how clearly God expects us to act in the world, having assigned his body responsibility and authority that if we fail to fulfill He does not usually step in to correct).
The confronted person then has had excuses removed and his deeds exposed to the light. Now he must either repent and begin to change or he must willfully resist. There is no middle ground. A change may be slow but will involve the correct trajectory, revealing the identity of the person's anchor/attractor/source to be God rather than his own self. Greatly material change may take a long time, but at least there will be repeated repentance and the continued growth of true grief over his sin.
If sin is like a wound, the difference of a Christian from an unbeliever is not that he never suffers bodily injury but that when he does, it heals (repentance + forgiveness). His body is alive rather than dead. A new wound to the body of a dead person neither bleeds nor heals.
To make a long story short, the
confronted and
convicted prideful/etc. man who does not repent is
always making a decision to continue doing so as a matter of personal policy.
In this case, after a sinning brother has received the treatment given in the Bible for correcting (confronting alone, confronting with a brother, and going before the church with it) if unrepentant he should be treated as an unbeliever and disfellowshipped (aka "church discipline") to the full extent for any aspect where Christ's name is concerned in the matter. Relate to the man as you do any unbeliever, with grace, kindness, tolerance (to a degree). Accept his invitation to his home. But do not explicitly or implicitly allow him to act in anyone's eyes, church or world, as if he were a Christian or to call himself one. Do not allow anything to appear as if you condone his behavior.
I confess that the idea that appearance matters so much is strange to me, but I still believe it's true despite how it almost smacks of relativism. Isn't all substance only apprehended through appearance anyway?. It is the *alignment* of appearance with substance that is called for, not the *elimination* of appearance. And when the substance is not demanded by God, then appearance trumps it handily (think of eating meat sacrificed to idols—doing so is not a command of God, so it loses out right quick as soon as it appears to anyone that you think idols have power, even the person is mistaken about the substance of the matter).
Forgive me for an already long post that I will make longer. I think there is an important principle at work in this. Disfellowshipping in my mind has an obvious effect on the unrepentant person, and it has an obvious effect on the body, but I also think it has a less obvious but nonetheless just as important effect on
the world.
This principle is that the fame of God's name matters, a lot. His reputation in the world is not a trivial thing. It is this principle at work in not eating food sacrificed to idols
when the person giving you the food knows that you know this, but not otherwise. It is the principle at work in avoiding not just evil, but also
the appearance of evil. It is the principle in avoiding things that are not themselves wrong but
might lead a weaker brother to stumble.
God cares that his people are salt and light in the world, and part of being salt and light is the world's perception that we are in fact different in the material ways that God cares for us to be. (See the fruit of the Spirit for a near exhaustive list of what those ways are.) Doing anything which sullies God's name (including Jesus, the name Christ, the religion Christianity, and so on) is a grave sin. Harold Camping should be disfellowshipped if he doesn't repent because he opens up the Christian name for ridicule and mockery through his false prophecy.
Unrepentant pride, greed, impatience, selfishness, and lack of love, when displayed by a person
calling himself a Christian and visible to the public eye is committing the same sin as Harold and should also be disfellowshipped in order to keep the name "Christian" as untarnished as is possible.
If after all this you think that "this is preposterous because then 80% of the people at church would be kicked out" then I think that you are probably right, they should be if they are unrepentant over confronted sin. The invisible, true church is so masked and occluded by the visible, tainted church. We
ought to kick out half the bodies if they aren't part of the body. They may repent and return! And in the meantime the local meeting brothers will experience incredible revival.
If "unrepentantly prideful, greedy, impatient, selfish, or unloving" describes any one of us then it can only be the
highest good for us to be publicly called on the carpet and forced to make a choice for or against Christ. I am SURE the effect would be incredibly salutary to God's kingdom. There have been times in my own life when I almost wished there was someone to yell at me and shame me for my actions, calling my sin what it is: a
horrible,
awful,
evil thing. There's a part of me that responds with incredible power to this kind of call (the part where Jesus lives in me)! Without such confrontation I am left to my own sneaky devices and my own hardness of heart that I've managed to work up into a shelter against the conviction of the Holy Spirit.
While a very quiet sin, to me it is just as bad as these things to fail to confront sin in the body (though not the world). Of course, to do so, we have to have confronted it in ourselves first. Perhaps the end result of all this thinking I've been taking my readers through is that we need to live more pure lives for Christ, thereby eliminating our disqualifications for confronting the sin in His body, and then doing so, to effectively purify His Church!
I sometimes wonder if "taking God's name in vain" could refer to publicly
calling oneself a Christian without embodying the true substance of one. God uses people in the world. His reputation, as partly revealed through us, matters.
It matters the whole world. If we lose our saltiness, who will further God's kingdom?