Erick Erickson doesn't get to decide

Since it's Sunday, I hope you don't mind a little theological discussion. If you do mind, just return to your secular pursuits

A while back, Erick Erickson, one of the amplified conservative voices, disparaged Pete Buttigieg's religious views, adding, by way of wider disparagement, that the Episcopal Church to which Mr. Buttigieg belongs, is "no longer a Christian institution."

I don't think he gets to decide who is or isn't Christian. I stand up every Sunday in an Episcopal Church and repeat the Nicene Creed. When I get to "he will judge the living and the dead," which the couple of hundred bishops who assembled in Nicea in A.D. 325 agreed on, I do not imagine that they were envisioning Erick Erickson.

But to be fair to Mr. Erickson, he hardly stands out as having made idiotic remarks about Christian belief. The council at Nicea, after all, was summoned by the Emperor Constantine in an effort to quell the disputatious and occasionally violent disagreements among the faithful, and Who's In And Who's Out has been a popular game among the sects ever since.

Perhaps all would benefit if those of us who consider ourselves Christian could keep in mind that we don't get to decide who is Christian and who is not, who is worthy of salvation and who will be denied it.

That doesn't mean that we can't talk theology and disagree. I think that pre-millennial dispensationalism is crackpot theology, and that the close vote in the fourth century to allow the Book of Revelation into the canon was badly decided. Biblical literalism is laughable, as are those mainstream congregations whose mission statement  appears to be, as a college roommate once said, "to mean well." Those prosperity Gospel congregations smell of a degraded and corrupt Calvinism. But when all those people call themselves Christians, I don't get to deny it. (Go ahead, call me a Latitudinarian. I'm a high-church Rite II Episcopalian, and I can take it.)

Let me put a question to you to test against your own tradition. Assume a person living among us in a nominally Christian culture who leads a moral life: honest, generous, virtuous, someone any of us would call a good person. But not a believer. At the Doom, what do you say will happen to that person? Will your denomination assign that good person to Hell? And if not, then what?

The Church has dealt with this conundrum before. The Roman Catholic Church constructed Limbo to include, among others, virtuous pagans, because the Church needed Aristotle. So are you OK with parking that virtuous person in some lobby just outside Heaven?

WWJD?