What does it mean to be a Christian? There are over 30,000 different groups, all of which answer this question differently. If agreement cannot be found on THIS issue, can the claims of Christians be taken seriously?

The number is real and the scandal is real. Jesus prayed that his followers would be one, so disunity is a failure the New Testament itself treats as sin. The question is what kind of failure it is.

1. The New Testament condemns division first. Jesus prayed “that they may all be one” so that the world might believe (John 17:20–21), and Paul treats the factions at Corinth as carnality, not diversity (1 Corinthians 1:10–13). Christians cannot wave this away. The objection is closer to the biblical assessment than the church's usual defensiveness.

2. 30,000 counts institutions, not gospels. The World Christian Encyclopedia counts denominations, jurisdictions, and networks — categories that include language groups, immigrant churches, and splits over property. It is not a count of mutually exclusive answers to “how is a person saved?”

3. The New Testament defines the core. “That Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures ... that he was raised on the third day” — Paul calls this “of first importance” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). That is a definable thing.

4. A test implies that some claimants fail it. John says to test the spirits by whether they confess Jesus Christ come in the flesh (1 John 4:2–3); Paul warns against “a different gospel” (Galatians 1:8–9); Jesus warns that many will call him Lord and be unknown to him (Matthew 7:21–23). The existence of people using the label wrongly is predicted, not surprising.

5. Turn it around: the count needs a definition. To say 30,000 groups answer “what is a Christian?” differently, you must already know what counts as a Christian answer and what counts as Christian. The objection borrows the core it claims does not exist. Without that definition, the number is a count of buildings.

6. The agreement is checkable, not sentimental. A Catholic, an Orthodox priest, and a Baptist can recite the same Nicene Creed without editing it. C.S. Lewis's “mere Christianity” is not a lowest common denominator invented for ecumenism; it is the material all three traditions actually confess.

7. The standard would dissolve every other field. Physicians disagree at the frontier, lawyers about statutes, historians about the causes of wars. Nobody concludes that medicine, law, or history has no subject matter. Theology is being held to a standard of unanimity no discipline meets.

8. Much division is culture and power, and our fault. Schisms have turned on language, ethnicity, money, and politics as often as on exegesis. James says quarrels come from “your passions” (James 4:1–3). The church should repent of this rather than explain it away; the objection is right about the sin even where it is wrong about the text.

9. The faith does not rest on denominational consensus. “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). Christianity turns on a historical event, not on whether Baptists and Presbyterians agree about church government. Disagreement downstream cannot falsify an event upstream.

10. What being a Christian actually means. A Christian is a person who trusts Jesus for salvation and confesses him as Lord — a follower, not a member of a faction. That definition is narrow enough to be meaningful and wide enough to include the Coptic monk, the Brazilian Pentecostal, and the Scottish Presbyterian. Their disagreements are real; their Lord is the same.

The objection is right that the divisions are a scandal and wrong that they leave the word “Christian” without content. The content is stated in the New Testament, confessed in the creeds, and repeated across traditions that otherwise argue about everything. A family with a loud argument is still a family.

Sources: C.S. Lewis; Mere Christianity; Michael Kruger; Gregory Koukl; Jaroslav Pelikan.

Related challenges:
• ALL sins are forgiven if you ‘accept Jesus as your savior’, right? What about the non-forgivable sin of blaspheming the Holy Spirit? We have a little CONTRADICTION problem here?!
• Why do arrogant Christians think they’re right about everything?
• Religion has caused most of the wars and evil in the world. Why do you want to perpetrate this?