The Extended Family: Why are There so Many Different Churches?

By Michael John Hooton and Nigel G. Wright

"Why are there so many different churches?" Tracing the family tree of the modern church back to the early Christian centuries, The Extended Family explains how and why the various Christian denominations arose. It outlines the distinctive beliefs, traditions, practices, and values of the many church families in modern Britain, what they have in common, and where they have either disagreed or agreed to differ. It also examines the vital question: whether any of the differences between churches should still matter today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: May 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781498280860

Michael John Hooton

Michael Hooton studied Modern Languages at Oxford and Theology at Spurgeon's College, London. He is the pastor of a Baptist church in the East Midlands in England.

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The Extended Family

Why are There so Many Different Churches?

Michael Hooton

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Foreword by Nigel G. Wright

The Extended Family

Why are There so Many Different Churches?

Copyright © 2016 Michael Hooton. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Lines from Wilfred Owen’s poem Dulce et decorum est are quoted with the permission of the Wilfred Owen Association; the poem is found in Wilfred Owen: the War Poems (Chatto and Windus, 1994, edited by Jon Stallworthy).

Scripture quotations are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION ®, Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

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Table of Contents

Foreword

Preface

Abbreviations

Chapter 1: The Extended Family

Chapter 2: The Developing Family

Chapter 3: The Modern Family

Chapter 4: The varied family

Chapter 5: The Leaders of the Family

Chapter 6: The Deviations from the Family

Chapter 7: One Family?

Bibliography

Foreword

The Christian Church is without a doubt one of the most remarkable phenomena in human history. Not only has it left indelible marks upon the way the world is, it currently embraces a larger proportion of the human race than any other religion, movement or philosophy. Although often spoken and acted against, it has so far managed to outlive, out-think and out-love a host of opponents; and although it shows signs of faltering in some places, not least Western Europe, in global terms it continues to expand, to embrace and to mutate. By anybody’s lights it is a remarkable story. Not only so, but the institutional forms that the various Christian churches have taken, although not of the spiritual essence of the church, have nonetheless survived into the present day as amongst the very oldest continuous institutions available to us, older than monarchies, parliaments, multi-nationals and anything else we care to name.

All this said, the story is inevitably a complex one. The very size, variety and age of the churches has led to some things being obscure or impenetrable to outsiders. When I was growing up I was aware, because of the city in which I lived, that there were Protestants and Catholics. Later the Pentecostals were added to the list. Since then I have come to see that this is only part of the story. On the one hand are the ancient churches of the Copts, the Armenians, the Orthodox, the Samaritans, the Ethiopians and more, and on the other hand the newer indigenous churches of Africa and Asia, to say nothing of the enterprising charismatic communities of the West. It is a burgeoning scene and it takes a comprehensive mapping exercise to help us know what is out there, what the diverse movements stand for and how the terminology they use should best be understood.

I do not know whether Michael Hooton has had a previous career as a cartographer, but in his lengthy and faithful service as a Christian minister he has certainly applied himself to understanding the landscape of the Christian Church. In this volume, in the tradition of the pastor-scholar, he makes a gift to us of his research, experience and understanding. Yet this is not simply the sharing of facts and information, valuable though that certainly is. There is a moral imperative here. We owe it to each other to understand, respect and learn from those who have other ways of being the church. The ecumenical journey that began in the early twentieth century is moving into a new stage, that of a corrective ecumenism that is bold enough to assert that we need not only to know of each other but to allow ourselves to be corrected by each other. If it is the case that all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas (1 Corinthians 3:21–23), then the charisms of any one part of the church are the commonwealth of all parts of the church. This is not to say that there are not legitimate differences of perspective, but it is a call to new levels of humility and aspiration.

When thinking about the church of Christ, however, it would be a mistake to think only about the past, or even the present. There is a future that awaits us and it is portrayed in visionary form in Revelation 7. Here we are shown a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!’ It is only this ultimate gathered community that can properly lay claim to be the true church. Here only do we see the church in its proper nature as one, holy, catholic and apostolic. All contemporary churches are on their way to that final goal, and if this volume can help us make steps on that journey it will have served its purpose well.

Dr Nigel G. Wright

Principal Emeritus, Spurgeon’s College, London

Preface

"

History, said Henry Ford, is bunk. Or rather, what he in fact said was, History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present." ¹

Many would of course challenge his dismissive attitude to history, even with the qualifying phrase more or less; most people would assume that it is perfectly possible to live in the present, but still to be interested in and appreciative of the past, and indeed that our living in the present can be considerably enriched by an awareness of the past out of which the present has grown. But one area in which the word tradition does tend to be viewed with suspicion is in the Christian church. The very phrase church tradition can, to many people, be assumed to imply that the church is a kind of museum in which are preserved various quaint beliefs and practices which are maintained because they are of historical interest, rather than because they have anything to do with life in the modern world.

Without in any way feeling the need to pander to the prejudices of the modern-day Henry Ford, I should say that this is not intended to be simply a history book. The motivation to produce this work arose, not from any desire to contribute to studies in church history, a field in which I am not a specialist, but from my pastoral experience, and its aim is to help people who struggle with questions about the church and, in particular, about different churches; in other words, to encourage people, as Ford would say, to live in the present, but with at least some understanding of how churches came to be what they are today. Every church leader knows that people who are new to church life, or who are starting to get interested in Christianity, will ask questions; again and again I found that one of the most frequent was, Why are there so many different churches? The question might come in various forms, such as What is the difference between your church and the Catholics?, or Are you the same as the Methodists? (One of the more bizarre questions I have heard was, Baptists?—you’re the ones who don’t drink, aren’t you? I’m still not sure how I should have answered that one.) Furthermore, my experience of ministry has taught me that many people in our churches have little or no understanding of the reasons for the origins of other denominations (and often of their own) or of the theological distinctions between the different branches of the church.

So I started producing some short notes, listing some of the main churches that people were most likely to have heard of, and their most important characteristics. When these seemed to prove interesting and helpful, I expanded them a bit . . . then a bit more . . . and then one day someone (perhaps fortunately, I cannot now remember who it was) suggested that these notes might usefully be turned into a proper book.

Hence the present work. Whether or not it is proper, I leave to others to decide. It is in no way intended as an academic history book, though I hope that such historical material as it contains is at least accurate and fair. And it certainly makes no claim to be comprehensive; it is perhaps more like a series of snapshots of the church than an exhaustive survey. It is intended to help the non-specialist to understand something of the various branches of the Christian church, how and why they arose, and what is distinctive about them.

Why does it matter? After all, people can believe in Jesus without having heard of Martin Luther or John Wesley; and no one would seriously suggest that reading about the origins of the Pentecostal movement is even remotely as important as learning to live a godly life, to read the Bible, to pray, to serve others in Jesus’ name. So why will reading this book benefit anyone?

Well, first, perhaps, because an awareness of who we are and where we have come from can be not only interesting but also a healthy reminder that we are part of a much bigger picture. God’s people in the Old Testament were urged always to remember and live in the light of what God had done for them in the past and of the historical developments that had made them the people they were today; and there is no reason to think that the same principle need not apply to the modern Christian. Isaiah 51:1 addresses all who pursue righteousness and who seek the Lord—and it would be nice to think that that might include people in Christian churches—and urges them to look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn. To Isaiah’s immediate audience that meant Abraham and the patriarchs of Israel; to Christians it means supremely Jesus himself and the early church in the New Testament; but there is also a sense in which the churches to which we belong today were hewn from the quarry of the church through history. We always need to avoid the danger of living in the past, but it is perhaps no bad thing to be at least aware of it.

Second, this book is intended as a tool that can be put into the hand of the inquirer or new disciple who is asking questions about the divisions within the church and the existence of so many denominations. Quite rightly, most pastors will not feel this is something they want to spend a lot of time preaching and teaching about; time with inquirers would be much better spent talking about Jesus and the Gospel, and those leading new converts’ groups will want to help and encourage their members to develop patterns of devotional life and Christian lifestyle. But when questions about different churches arise, it might be useful to have a book that the person asking the questions can read through on their own.

Third, one of the areas of interest in the Christian scene today is the church—especially the purpose of the church, and experimentation with new forms of church. Some recent books reflect this concern: in 2005 David Devenish published a work with the provocative title What On Earth Is The Church For?; and one of the best-selling books of the last couple of decades has been Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Church (followed by an even more popular sequel, The Purpose Driven Life). Many contemporary groups have sought to establish new and different forms of church; yet however new a church may be, it has grown out of some existing model of church, even if primarily by reacting against it. As the writer of Ecclesiastes reminds us, there is nothing new under the sun. An awareness of how the church has developed through its history is a necessary backdrop to reflection on how we can develop, to quote another book title (by Rob Warner), a Twenty-First Century Church.

But fourth, it is a fact, and a very healthy and encouraging one, that there is a great deal of positive co-operation and inter-relationship between different denominational churches these days; because of that, it might help if Christians know something about the traditions from which those with whom they work are coming. Stereotypical ideas about other churches are still disturbingly widespread; Christians who, for some reason, recently visited a church of a different denomination may often comment that they were surprised to find that it was quite different from what they had always assumed an Anglican church (or a Methodist church, or a Newfrontiers Church, or whatever it might be) would be like. It is my hope that this book might help to broaden the horizons of people whose Christian life has been focused within one particular church stream.

I might be accused of having devoted at least as much space, especially in chapter 2, to smaller and more recent groups in the church, as to the big institutional churches, Anglican and Roman Catholic, which are probably the best known amongst the general (non-church-going) public in our country. It is true that the word-count assigned to each denomination is sometimes out of proportion to its relative size. But there are reasons for that. First, anyone wanting to know about the Church of England or the Catholic Church can fairly easily find a number of sources of information—especially these days, when the first port of call for anyone looking for information is the internet. What is less common is anything that sets different branches of the church alongside each other and compares them; and in particular anything that treats each part of the Body of Christ as equally worth knowing about. But second, I do not believe that statistical size is necessarily the same as spiritual significance. Amongst the Jewish factions in New Testament days, the Pharisees are believed to have numbered at least six thousand; the Christian church, in Jesus’ time, numbered at best a couple of hundred, with a hard core of twelve. But there is no doubt which group made a greater impact on subsequent history. And the sections of the church which are most numerically prominent may or may not be those that are most spiritually influential. And third, to any individual believer, the church that most matters to him or her is the one he or she is actually related to, or has become in some way attached to—and if that happens to be a church with a less well-known name, he or she might like to know if and how it relates to the rest of the wider church.

I have made a particular point of defining as many terms as possible. To those who might feel this is a trifle over-academic, and makes the book in places read almost like a dictionary, I would simply suggest that if we are going to use words to talk about church, it helps if we know what they mean. I admit that I am particularly fascinated by words, their origins and meanings. I can only hope that others who share that taste might find some of the background information about the significance of terms used in church jargon interesting; and that those who do not will at least not be put off the main thrust of the text.

One small point about the way words are spelled in this book may be helpful: words describing different kinds of church are spelled with a capital letter when they are part of the title of an organized denomination, but with a small letter when used as an adjective to describe a particular theory of what church should be; so for example, Congregational is the name of the denomination that arose at the end of the sixteenth century as the first of the radical free churches, and congregational is the pattern of church found in a number of denominations in which each local church is self-governing. Similarly, the word church is spelled with a small letter when it is a collective word for believers, but with a capital C when it is part of a denominational title.

The statistics quoted are supplied by Dr Peter Brierley, to whose expert and detailed analysis of religious trends in the UK for over forty years the whole church is greatly indebted; most are taken from UK Church Statistics 2005–2015, which summarizes statistical trends in mainstream British churches over a decade, and projects estimated figures for 2015, and is henceforth referenced simply as UKCS; some are from Religious Trends 6, based on the UK Church Census of 2005, which is the most recent report to include statistics about the proportions of churches in England that classify themselves as evangelical, liberal, catholic, broad, etc. In both these works, references are not to page numbers, as they are not paginated in the conventional way, but according to sections and sub-sections, indicated as §; only the introduction to UKCS (§ 0.2) is divided into numbered pages.

Unless otherwise stated, Scripture quotations are taken from the New International Version; I have used the 1996 edition (Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan).

I owe special thanks to some people who have helped in various ways in preparing this work for publication: in particular to Nigel Wright, for his very positive foreword, and to Andy Thomson, who completed the final formatting of the manuscript, and kept going despite my repeated emails regarding yet more last-minute changes. Neither of these gentlemen should be held in any way responsible for the content of the book; but their kindness is much appreciated. And in particular, a number of people (from a variety of denominational backgrounds!) read through initial drafts of this book, and all made extremely helpful comments; not least, they encouraged me to believe that it was worth keeping going. To them, and to the many close friends from a variety of different churches, who have greatly enriched and expanded my understanding of what a wonderful privilege it is to belong to the church of Jesus Christ, I offer my thanks.

1. In an interview with Charles N. Wheeler in the Chicago Tribune,

25

th May

1916

; quoted in ODQ,

289

.

Abbreviations

MTP The Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit: Sermons by C. H. Spurgeon. Pasadena, Texas: Pilgrim Publications, 63 vols., 1969–80.

NBD New Bible Dictionary, edited by I. H. Marshall et al. Leicester, UK: Inter-Varsity Press, third edition, 1996.

ODQ The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, edited by Angela Partington. Oxford University Press/London: Book Club Associates, fourth edition, 1992.

SOED The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, revised and edited by C. T. Onions, 2 vols. Oxford University Press/London: Book Club Associates, 1983.

UKCS UK Church Statistics 2005–2015, edited by Peter Brierley. Tonbridge, UK: ADBC, 2011.

1

The Extended Family

The Many Faces of Christianity

The French satirical writer Voltaire complained, in the middle of the eighteenth century, that England had 365 religions and only one sauce. These days, if the number of sauces on the supermarket shelves has increased, the number of Christian groups is also showing no signs of diminishing. Anyone wanting to explore Christianity, or anyone coming new into church life, is confronted with a bewildering array of churches: Methodist, Baptist, Anglican, Pentecostal, United Reformed, Salvation Army, and many others. UKCS estimates that there are now in Britain 340 Christian denominations, a rise from 275 in 2006 , ¹ though it notes that most of the increase is due to the founding of more and more branches of new Pentecostal churches, many of which have only a small number of related congregations. Moreover, Christians often use a number of adjectives to describe different churches, such as evangelical, traditional, free, charismatic, as well as other words that are more familiar as the names of political parties, like conservative or liberal; and the people who use terms like these rarely define what they mean by them—in fact, the cynic might almost suspect that they don’t really know what they mean by them. A teenager was once asked what the basic difference was between the Anglican Parish Church and the local Baptist Church, both of which he had visited; he replied that, at the Parish Church, they served coffee in china cups after the services, but the Baptists drank mugs of tea. It might have been interesting to find out whether the members of the respective congregations could have given an answer with any more theological substance.

To make matters worse, the person who is new to church will probably also have heard of various other groups, like those Jehovah’s Witnesses who call round at regular intervals, and may wonder if they are another Christian church or something different. And he might have a friend at work who says he goes to The Christian Centre, or, even more confusing, to a group with a name like Springs of Living Water or The Vineyard Fellowship. No wonder people get confused, and ask embarrassing questions, like Why are there so many different churches?

This book is intended to help people who are new to Christianity, or who are unfamiliar with church, to understand the various groups that make up the Christian family—how and why they arose, and what is distinctive about them—and also to be able to distinguish them from those other groups that have borrowed some ideas from bits of Christianity, or that use some of the same language as Christianity, but are in fact not Christian at all.

The various branches of the Christian church are traditionally referred to as denominations—the word means names or ways of naming. The non-Christian groups are usually called cults or sects. Cult is from a word meaning worship or religious rites,² and refers to a distinctive and exclusive approach to religion; sect is from the Latin word for a group of followers, and refers to a separate group of people committed to following a particular leader or religion. Up to the mid-twentieth century, the word sect was often used to refer to Christian Protestant denominations; for example, C. S. Lewis wrote in 1948 (in his essay God In The Dock)³ of extreme Protestant sects, (e.g. Baptists) (!). These days, using the word sect of Christian denominations—except as a technical term in the sociology of religion⁴—is apt to cause confusion and even resentment, and is perhaps better avoided.

In this book the normal word denominations will be used to refer to branches of the Christian church (Church of England, Methodists, Baptists, etc.),⁵ although I accept that there are a number of groups within the Christian church that prefer not to think of themselves as denominations; the implications of the term are discussed in a later chapter. And non-Christian groups, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, will be referred to as cults; but I understand that many people use the word sect in the same sense as cult.

The Basis of This Book

Five things should be said about the views that lie behind this book.

1. The basic understanding of the church that underlies all the comments in this book is the view usually known as evangelical: that is, that the Bible is the sole and absolute authority for all matters of Christian faith, life, practice and order, and is normative for the whole church. Ideas about what the church should be or do are to be judged as right or wrong inasmuch as they conform to or depart from what the New Testament says. On that basis, no single denomination can claim to be 100 percent right about everything; but most have identified and sought to embody some aspects of the New Testament model of church, which have become their distinctive strengths.

2. The information in this book is very basic; and, when it comes to the cults, it will not be sufficient to engage in debate or discussion with members of the cults. Anyone who wants to do that—and it is not to be undertaken lightly—will need far more information than is found here. And new Christians are strongly urged not to get too interested in exploring the cults, unless it is because they have a personal reason for needing to learn about a particular cult—for example, because they have a close relative who is involved in it. But there are some good books that can help: for example: Josh McDowell and Don Stewart, Understanding the Cults, Nigel Scotland, Pocket Guide to Sects and New Religions, Maurice Burrell, The Challenge of the Cults, or Eryl Davies, The Guide: Truth Under Attack. The series of booklets called What They Believe by Harold Berry, published by Back to the Bible Publishing, covers most cults and religious movements (and also the major world religions, like Islam and Hinduism, which are not dealt with in this book). Most good Christian bookshops will stock or recommend books or booklets explaining about any particular cult from a Christian perspective; a very simple but helpful leaflet is Christianity, Cults and Religions (Rose Publications), which summarizes the essential beliefs (about God, Jesus, heaven, etc.) of twenty groups, including the main world religions, alongside what the Bible says about each topic. And the Reachout Trust, a Christian organization specializing in education about and mission to the cults, provides information about the cults which is reliable, up-to-date, balanced and well researched.⁶

3. Regarding the Christian denominations, the view held in this book, and by the overwhelming majority of evangelical believers in all denominations, is that anyone who trusts in Jesus Christ as their personal Savior and Lord is a Christian, regardless of denomination. That does not mean that the differences between denominations are completely irrelevant, or even unimportant; but they are at most secondary. Anyone who believes in Jesus is a member of the one true church of Jesus Christ.

4. This book tries—especially in chapters 2 and 4—to be as objective as possible, and to give basic factual information about all the denominations. Inevitably there are sometimes assessments to be made; this has always been done with the intention of being honest about my convictions, and never with any desire to cause offence to those holding different views about church. For the record, the author is a Baptist pastor who has been very positively helped by and is deeply indebted to Christian friends and colleagues from a wide variety of denominational backgrounds, and who is sometimes quite critical of a number of aspects of Baptist church life. The last chapter, sub-titled How Should We Think About Denominations?, tries to sum up my views on the place of denominations in the contemporary church. Most of the rest of the book tries to be objective rather than polemical, at least in denominational terms, though I am admittedly more explicit (especially in chapter 3) when it comes to my personal convictions in the discussion between different fundamental schools of theology; and it would have been disingenuous to pretend that I have no views about what the church should be.

5. Finally, the comments that follow, especially those in chapters 3 and 7, are intended primarily to reflect the church scene in Britain—and more specifically, in England. The nature of the relations between different branches of the church can be very different in other parts of Europe and the world.

The Essential Marks of Real Christianity

There are two ways of expressing the essential differences between the Christian denominations and the cults: historically, or theologically.

Historically, all the Christian denominations claim to be part of the historical church of Jesus Christ that dates back to the New Testament, and they see themselves as standing in that tradition. Cults usually stand apart from that historical lineage; they do not normally regard themselves, as Christian denominations would, as a new or reformed group within the unfolding history of the church, but rather as a new movement founded in a deliberate rejection of and departure from the historical Christian churches.

Theologically, the cults invariably show two important differences from the biblical Gospel.

1. Christian groups are all Trinitarian; that is, they believe that there is one God, who exists eternally in three Persons—Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is the distinctively Christian doctrine about the nature of God. Cults normally reject the idea of the Trinity; they would deny that God is Three-in-One.

Specifically, what this means in practice is that orthodox Christianity affirms that Jesus Christ is fully divine: that he is God the Son, who became a human being. To all the cults, though Jesus may be important, he is invariably seen as less than fully God, and he is not worshiped as Lord and God.

2. Christian denominations all affirm salvation by God’s grace, through the work of Jesus in his death and resurrection; in other words, salvation is a free gift that we can do nothing to earn or deserve or achieve, but that Jesus has made freely available for us and that we receive on the basis of faith in Jesus alone. Cults normally speak of something that people need to do in order to attain salvation. (Note: this second key characteristic may raise some difficult questions when it comes to Roman Catholicism—more on that later.)

It is important to stress that whether or not a group is a cult is a matter of objective fact, based on the doctrines that the group claims to believe. It is not a subjective or arbitrary opinion; and it is certainly not a moral judgment. There is no doubt that members of the cults can be very sincere, kind and devoted people—that is not the issue.⁷ What defines the group they belong to as a cult is a simple question: do they believe that Jesus is God the eternal Son, and do they believe that God saves people by free grace, through faith in Jesus?

This need to define the difference between a Christian church and a cult is simply one aspect of the widespread confusion in our society about the meaning of the word Christian. The term is used in a number of ways which are different from its meaning in the New Testament and in the historical tradition of the church: two in particular are very common. Christian is often used to mean little more than western religious.⁸ Jehovah’s Witnesses are a western religious group; so, it is assumed, they must be part of the Christian church. There are those to whom it seems absurd to say of anyone that they believe in God but are not a Christian; but it is no more absurd than to say that a particular shape has four sides but is not a square. When those whose definition of a square is nothing more than having four sides protest that we are being nit-picking, we need to point out that an oblong or a trapezoid has four sides, but that they also have other qualities which distinguish them from squares, and that if we want to take geometry seriously we need to define our terms rather more precisely. And if we want seriously to discuss spiritual things, we need to define our terms just as carefully, rather than lumping together everything that is more or less religious and calling it Christian.

There may be two erroneous ideas that lie behind this assumption that western religious means Christian. The first is that, because cults like the Jehovah’s Witnesses are an off-shoot of Christianity, they must be part of Christianity. But that does not follow. The Christian church is like a multi-lane motorway, and the various denominations are all lanes on that motorway. But there are some roads that branch off from motorways; and when you take them—forgive me for stating the obvious—you are no longer on the motorway, but on a different road, with a different designation, on which different rules apply, and you are going in a different direction from the motorway. The doctrines held by cults designate them as roads branching off from the Christian church, rather than as parts of it.

The other reason people might assume that cults are to be classified as part of the Christian church is that they normally give some place to a doctrine of Jesus. But having a doctrine of Christ does not make them Christian. If it comes to that, Islam has a doctrine of Christ—he is spoken of in the Koran as Son of Mary, the Messiah (which is the Hebrew word for the Greek title Christ, and means the anointed one), and a prophet—but few people would regard it for that reason as a branch of Christianity. The defining characteristic of a Christian church is not having some view of Jesus, but maintaining the same doctrine of Jesus that is taught in the New Testament.

The second frequent misunderstanding about the word Christian is even more confusing: it is commonly used, not to define people’s beliefs but to commend their morals. Christian has come, for many people, to mean simply good, kind, caring: one of the definitions of Christian in Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary, following a believer in the religion of Christ, is often a vague term of approbation, a decent, respectable, kindly, charitably minded person. So a kind-hearted Mormon, for example, may be described as being more Christian than some people in Christian churches; even more paradoxically, I have heard people say of some Muslims that they are very Christian, really—one might wonder how the Muslims in question would feel about being so described! And to say of anyone that they are not Christian is taken to be a moral criticism.

This kind of language is really not helpful. At its worst, it becomes a kind of Humpty-Dumpty approach to words; in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass Humpty-Dumpty explains to Alice that when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean. It would appear that Humpty-Dumpty is alive and well in twenty-first-century