A Public Address

There are two main considerations I wish the public at large would make when dealing with scandals in the "church".

1. There are three divisions that orthodox Christianity would make among people in the world:

• Members of the invisible Church. Persons who God has saved; God no longer looks at their sin in hatred, but He has placed that hatred for their sin on Christ at the cross; when they recognize that they have sinned against God, these individuals agree with God that they have done wrong, and in varying degrees, they struggle against sinful habits.
• Members of the visible church. Persons who consider and probably refer to themselves as "Christians", normally due to family tradition, and they may even attend church regularly, but they have never actually had their sins put on Jesus the Son by by God the Father; they may feel sorry for their mistakes and what they do wrong, but they never actually agree with God that they are wrong to the degree that they continue a life-long struggle against their sins.
• Persons who either, don't believe God exists (thus there is no transcendent being to offend), or they believe He exists and they don't think they have any need to ask His forgiveness because they don't believe that He can be offended.

2. The second thing is that, the members of all three of these groups have one thing in common, they do make mistakes, do things wrong, they do offend morals, they do offend the common ethos, but the difference is in the way individuals in each group deal with their guilt. The first group sees their guilt and shame paid for by Christ, the second usually ends up trying to propitiate their own guilt, often living lives of legalism, and some in the third group try to satisfy the demands of a "new" law they devise by assimilating thoughts from various ethical systems and even from absolute morals, but I believe that the larger part of the third group attempts to absolve their guilt ex nihilo, or "out of nothing". When they have determined that there is no God to offend, or that He is never offended, then they vainly attempt to convince themselves that they have no guilt, thus their minds are blinded, their hearts are darkened, and their consciences seared. This produces either great antinomianism or great legalism.