I frequently say "you are an enemy of Christ" OR "you hold heretical and blasphemous beliefs" OR "you are not representing the Christian Gospel" if you are not anarchist. I mean what I say. This post intends to dispel any confusion by clarifying what I am saying and not saying.
First, here is what I believe but rarely state in explicit terms : "If one is not an anarchist, one has misunderstood the Gospel, and the Law, and one is a heretical blasphemer, contributing to the violence and evil in the world. Such a person is an enemy of Christ. HOWEVER, one can be a self-deceived enemy of Christ, i.e. act in ignorance or a state of being deceived. One can act against the moral order, and against all goodness, and against all of God's reconciling, recreating acts, and be a condoner of legalizing violence and legalizing immorality, and still not be outside the loving, sacrificial, embrace of the Creator." (For that matter, I don't believe anyone is outside that embrace. You being an enemy of God, does not make Him your eternal enemy).
With that out of the way, here are some assumptions folks have made about what they think I am saying, and my clarifications :
- "You are going to hell". Clarification : No, I am not. I know what folks mean by the modern interpretation of "go to hell", and even if we were to presuppose that modern innovation to be absolutely true, I do not believe that absolute assent to certain propositional truths, true as they might be, is a pre-condition for receiving grace, or being in the loving embrace of God, or for "salvation", even if we were to accept what that word means in its modernist framing ("escape from eternal excruciating torture").
- "You have no virtues or goodness". Clarification : No, I am not. One may do a lot of good, even if, on balance, all that is outweighed by the evil they do or condone. It is quite an avoidable tragedy when an otherwise good person engages in or perpetuates great evil.
- "I am virtuous". Clarification : No, I am not, in the sense that I do not always act morally. However, I have an objective measure by which I judge my own actions as well as that of others as moral or immoral. This measure is the Eternal Immutable Law (you may call it God's Moral Law or Natural Law). I am claiming that anyone who opposes this objective measure is, by default, immoral since they can justify and rationalize anything to themselves, given that, the only other option is moral relativism. Any moral good that they do happens in spite of their immoral beliefs. Any immorality I practice happens despite my knowledge of the fact that it is immoral -- and I need to repent and restitute for those actions. I do not need to be a saint to point to an action, either by myself or others, and claim that it is evil or good.
- "I define the boundaries of heresy and blasphemy". Clarification : We all have a subjective understanding of what is heresy and blasphemy. Yes, whether you are Protestant "sola scriptura" or Apostolic "Holy Tradition", all self-described Christians have an internal understanding of the line between true belief and false belief, which arises from a combination of external authorities (Tradition, Scripture) or internal moral intuition (conscience, reason). I am just honest about my own beliefs, in which I do not accept that logically inconsistent beliefs about ethics (e.g. Statist beliefs like "God desires that we desire rulers for ourselves and impose rulers on others", "some people can violate law for the greater good", etc.) can be anything but heretical and blasphemous. (As an aside, folks who believe in the visible Church -- Catholics or Orthodox -- have the notion of formal heresy, which I accept. But, I argue that even they (i.e. myself included), cannot avoid developing views that are not yet formalized).