It's a valid question, but why are you making this about Protestants and Catholics?
I looked back to my original post in this thread, I can see how you could infer that I was making this about Protestants and Catholics. However, when I wrote “many Protestants” I was trying to say that I don’t see this as occuring in all forms of Protestantism.
Not everyone is brought up in a Christian household, taken to Sunday School, read Bible stories etc. Even if they are, that doesn't make them Christian; any more than being born in MacDonald's makes them a hamburger.
After reading the many comments on this thread from different kinds of Protestants, it seems to me that the phenomenon I referred to in the opening post if this thread occurs in some Protestant churches because in today’s Chtitianity, there is no single definition for who qualifies as a Christian.
Your McDonald’s hamburger analogy is one example of a way a person defined what a Christisn is. I have heard others say only a person that believes in Jesus snd has recited the “sinners prayer” is a Christian.
Others say a person must be “born again,” and of course these people have their own definition of what it means yo be “born again.”
The current definition of what a Christian is in the Catholic Church is any person has been valudly bspitized using the Trinitarian formula. However, simply reciting the words of the Trinitarian formula in a baptism is not enough, the words must be intended to refer to the doctrine of the Trinity. That’s why the Catholic Church considers Protestants to be Christians, but the church has declared Mormon baptisms are invalid.
I have found that most people are unaware of certain aspects of languages, and this is not exclusive to Christianity. For example, many people don’t seem to acknowledge that different people and groups give different definitions to the same word.
An example I like to give for this is concerns the definition of a tomato in the United States. You may be familiar with the fun debate about whether a tomato is defined as a fruit or a vegetable. Thanks to a late nineteeth century United States decision, we have teo definitions in the United States.
The issue in this case concerned the interpretation of a law that imposed a tariff on the importation of vegetables. The US government believed they could enforce the tariff on tomato importers. However, the tomato importers argued that thr tariff did not apply to them because a tomato is a fruit, and the tariff in question only applies to vegetables.
In their decision, the Supreme court sided with the US government. Thr court acknowledge that in scientific terms, a tomato is a fruit. However, they reasoned that the American people use tomatoes as if they are vegetables and therefore, for the putposes of the tariff, a tomato is defined as a vegetable.
Another thing I have noticed is that some people don’t seem to understand that a word’s definition can drastically change over time. I’ll give you two exsmples.
The first example is the word, “dude.” Today the word “dude” is typically used to refer to a man. However, long ago, in the United States, the word referred to a specific kind of man, and it was a sort if insult.
The tough westerners, like cowboys for example, used the word “dude” to refer to a man who is a wimpy city dweller. You may have heard of dude ranches. Because of the romanticization of the American West, people in the west started to establish dude ranches to offer greenhorns ftom eastern cities, they called dudes, the have the “western” experince.
The second example is the word “liberal.” In the United States this word used to mean the opposite of what it means today, and this is still the case in most of the world. The word “liberal” used to refer to a person like Ronald Regan. However, at some point, the political left realized that being called socialist was stigmatizing them, so they successfuly appropriated the word “liberal,” and, as I’m sure you know, all Americans understand that a liberal is a person on the politicsl left. I know this probably doesn’t make sense to younger people who have grown up in an America where people on the political left are now proud yo be called socialist.
Anyway, let’s get back to the question if who qualifies to be condidered s Christian. The truth is, that none of the definitions modern Christians use to determine who is considered to be a Christian corresponds to the way the word “Christian” was defined in the ancient world.
As I discussed in post # 24 in this thread, it was very common for early Christians to postpone their baptism. Yet, they were still considered to be Christians. Even do, the church did distinguish the unbaptized Christians from the baptized Christians. The unbaptized Christians were called “catechumens,” and the baptized Christians were called the “Faithful.”
These two types of Christians were treated differently when it csme time to celebrate the Sunday liturgy. Most people, including modern Catholics, are unaware that the divine ligurgy is actually made up of two distinct liturgies. In the early church, the first was called the litergy of the catechumens. Today it’s called the liturgy of the Word. The second liturgy was originally called the litury of the faithful, but is now called the liturgy of the Euchsrist.
Anyway the first liturgy was attended by both the catechumens and the faithful. Hiwever, at the conclusion if this first liturgy, the unbaptized were dismissed and only the baptized were permitted to be present at the second to celebrate the mystery of the Eucharist, also called Holy Communion. This is no longer the practice in the Catholic Church. Currently, any one is permitted to be present in the second ligurgy, even non-Christians.
Finally, I would also point out that the Romann Empire also considered unbsptized Christisns to be Christians. During the Great Persecution, the unbaptized Christians were subject to the torture and death by the Romans regardless of whether a Christisn had been baptized ot not.
So what is a Christian? Certainly a case can be made to support any definition a Christian chooses to accept. However, I have never heard of an arguement that has been able prove, with 100% certainty, that anyone’s particular definition is correct, and all others are wrong. This, of course, is becsuse that’s not the way language works.
