Karlo Broussard explains how to talk to Christians who believe that they only need their own personal relationship with Jesus, and belonging to a particular Church is unnecessary for a full spiritual life.
Transcript:
Host: We go to Ron in Wintersville, Ohio, listening on God’s Word. Is that right, Ron?
Caller: Yes.
Host: Oh, very good.
Caller: Thank you so much, this must be fathers/sons day, because I was with my adult son just last week, and it’s an aspect of relativism, and it’s syncretism, I guess. It’s that he has many friends who are…who say, “All I need is a relationship with Jesus, and religion is so divisive, so I don’t need to be part of a church—“ some actually do attend some Protestant churches, but a good number of them don’t. And I wondered if there’s some audio resource that would be good for him to listen to, to, in a nice way, obviously these are his friends, but he wants to sort of help work with them as well.
Karlo: Alright, so what you’re saying is that this idea of relativism seems to have in some way made its way into these particular forms of Christianity, and the argument being, “Because religion is so divisive, well then, I don’t need to belong to any religion, but I just need to believe in Jesus.” Is that the gist of it?
Caller: “Me and Jesus.”
Karlo: “Just me and Jesus,” right? Well, first of all, here’s one thought, Ron. Notice that the argument, or the basis for the argument, is that religions are divisive. Well, you can simply turn the tables on the individual who’s making that argument and say, “Well, do you believe in an absolute truth?” And you mentioned that some of these folks are Christian, coming from a Christian community. Well yes, they’re going to believe in absolute truth, namely: Jesus Christ is God. Okay. Well, that’s a claim of objective truth. But there are others who do not believe that Jesus Christ is God. There are others who do not believe that God exists in the first place. So the very fact that these Christian individuals are making an objective claim, a claim about objective reality—Jesus is God, God exists—by its very nature constitutes a dividing line from those who do not believe that Jesus God and who do not believe that God exists.
So their argument from religion being divisive doesn’t hold water, because inasmuch as they profess objective truths, they’re constituting boundaries and dividing lines. That’s just the very nature of truth itself. P, not P, right? If you say, “God exists,” well, the contrary to that is “God doesn’t exist.” So the minute you make a statement about objective reality, you’re drawing a dividing line, you’re drawing a boundary. So that’s what I would say in regard to the argument from divisiveness.
Now concerning the “Me and Jesus thing,” Ron, here’s the key: Okay, “Me and Jesus.” Alright, I look at these historical documents, these early Christian writers are talking about the historical Jesus, right, and we can go through all the historiographical research to say that Jesus existed, I can trust the Gospels, alright. We don’t have time to do that, but let’s say we’ve done that; we’ve done our research, this Jesus guy made some claims to be God. Okay, I accept that, he rose from the dead, vindicated those claims.
Now we also have to look, Ron, at what Jesus left us. He left us a Christian community. And not just a Christian community where everybody’s relative in their Christian thinking, of saying, “Oh, well, I’m gonna believe what I think Jesus taught, and you just go ahead and believe what you think Jesus taught.” No, Jesus gave us a Church, Ron, a Christian community with constituted officials to guide and lead His group of people, His flock. And we see this explicitly in Matthew 16:18-19; He constitutes Peter as the visible and central leader of the twelve. In Matthew 18:15-17, He talks about when there’s a disagreement, you take it to the Church, and the Church is going to have the final say regarding the matter. We see this played out in Acts chapter 15 at the Council of Jerusalem; when there was a theological debate about circumcision, they brought it to the Church, they brought it to the Church leaders and the truth was declared.
So no such thing as “Only me and Jesus,” but “Me, Jesus, and His Church.”