Aren't you Christian too?

I am supposed to be working on a piece of paper right now, but I think I want to take a mental break and engage a bit in polemic. I believe that I have talked about this before. It increasingly bothers me to see believers beginning to take on certain line towards the Roman Catholic Church and its followers as a whole. Essentially, what I have always heard is that they see Roman Catholics, and they talk about God and they dun know God and not considered believers (!?!?). The argument is somewhere along that line.

My response (in brief) is multi-faceted. Firstly, nowhere in my study in theology has I come across any writers or theologians who classify Roman Catholics outside of Christiandom. It's not Christianity and Roman Catholicism, but it's just Christianity. Based on what I have heard from people (yes, even in Hope Church and among some of the more matured believers), they need to think about this, why.

Secondly, the fact that Catholics practices are different from the mainstream protestant denominations today does not mean that they cannot be considered as a denomination of Christianity as a whole. I seriously think that the people whom I have heard from will need to re-examine their assumptions.

Thirdly, one needs to take into account of nominal Christianity. What does it mean? It means that someone can claim to be a Christian who attends church but only see it as a cultural obligation. This is what's happening in a lot of Latin American countries and a lot of countries with Catholic heritage. But wait a minute, doesn't that happen all the time to other Christian denominations? Someone claims to be Christian (Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran etc) but sees himself as a Christian only because he is born into a Christian family? I wonder does the people whom I am thinking of ever think of these questions, or they just assume that as long as you see a Catholic, he/she must not have had a relationship with God through Jesus, etc. I think we need to be more critical than that.

In short, intellectually, we need to ponder if there is any reason for us to segregate out Catholicism as a non-Christian religion. Existentially, we need to figure out if the Catholic down the road is as much 'saved' as the common so-called Christian who claims himself as a Christian. Theologically, we need to establish what makes us a Christian or not a Christian.

This post has nothing against any denominations, but my thoughts on how we should view ourselves and others.

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