“Christian” nominalists make up one of the largest mission fields in the world and quite possibly the largest in the United States.1 Any treatment of evangelism in the American culture would be deficient without a discussion of the peculiar challenges presented by the nominalist mindset.

 Definition

     The term nominal is derived from the Latin term nominales, meaning "belonging to a name." Thus, a Christian nominalist is one who claims the name Christian, but who has no authentic, personal, sin-forgiving and life-changing relationship with Jesus Christ. His allegiance to Jesus is in name, not heart.

     The Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization has identified five types of nominalists in terms of their relationship to a church congregation:

     (1) One who attends church regularly and worships devoutly, but who has no vital personal relationship with Jesus as Savior and Lord.

     (2) One who attends church regularly but for cultural reasons only.

    (3) One who attends church only for major church festivals (Christmas, Easter, etc.) and ceremonies (weddings, baptisms, funerals).

     (4) One who hardly ever attends church but maintains a church relationship for reasons of security, emotional or family ties, or tradition.

     (5) One who has no relationship to any specific church and who never attends, yet considers himself a believer in God (in a Protestant traditional sense).2

     These five categories are helpful in that they show us both the broad range of differences among nominalists and the common thread that ties them all together. While one nominalist may be a regular and devout churchgoer, another may have no relationship with a church. One nominalist may hold a sincere religious commitment to spiritual truth as they see it, while another may be indifferent to spiritual matters altogether.

     Regardless of the wide range of diversity, however, all nominalists could be described as professors, not possessors, of Jesus Christ. While claiming the title of Christian they have all failed to comprehend the cruciality of a personal commitment to Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins. As one of my friends described his nominalist roommate, "He had all the right words, but none of the music in his heart."

     The nominalist has been spiritually inoculated. He has been so exposed to what he believes is true Christianity that he reasons there is nothing more to it beyond his present experience. Some nominalists think this condition is just fine, glad that Christianity asks nothing more of them than church attendance or intellectual agreement with certain doctrines. There is no sense of need here. Such intellectual assent is thought to be sufficient personal involvement in spiritual matters. Anything more would be approaching fanaticism.

     Others, however, feel let down. "If this is all that being a Christian is, it's sure not life-changing or personally relevant," they reason. Many of these nominalists are ready to respond to the gospel.

At the Heart of the Matter

     The nominalist, for whatever reason, has failed to come to terms with his sin problem and its resolution in Christ. While he may correctly analyze the problem and the solution, he will fall short of dealing with sin on God's terms but will insist on approaching God on his own terms.

     The nominalist's attitude toward forgiveness betrays his unbiblical thinking on the seriousness of sin and the holiness of God. We can divide this thinking into three categories:

     (1) Forgiveness is not required. This nominalist has reasoned either that sin is not serious enough to fall under God's judgment or that God is not serious enough about sin to judge it. This person is the one who made I'm OK, You're OK a best seller. He worships the easy-going God of whom Omar Khayyam wrote, "He's a good fellow and 'twill all be well. " God sits on a rocking chair, not a throne of judgment, and forgiveness is not even an issue worth discussing. Pascal said of such people, "Truly it is an evil to be full of faults; but it is a still greater evil to be full of them and to be willing to recognize them, since that is to add to the further fault of a voluntary illusion.”3

     (2) Forgiveness is required, but earned. This person reasons, "Yes, we need God to forgive, but this forgiveness is secured on the basis of good deeds." He operates on a vague notion that if his good deeds outweigh his bad, forgiveness has been earned. The means of earning this right standing with God usually includes "being good" and following the rules of one's religious group.

     Of these people, Campbell Moody wrote, "Everywhere men seek, as of old, to satisfy their conscience by the performance of duty, or by telling themselves that they have done their duty, that they have never harmed anyone, or that, at least they are as good as those who make a profession of religion, and better, perhaps, for they are not hypocrites....nothing so shuts men from God's Kingdom as self-justification does."4

     (3) Forgiveness is required, but automatic. God is concerned about sin, but thanks to His great mercy and love, all will be forgiven eventually. Thus, while sin is indeed an issue, it is swallowed up in God's overwhelming love. This theological error is called universalism and fails to take seriously the holiness of God and Jesus' warnings about the grim possibility of an eternity of separation from Him.

     The nominalist has traveled a different route from the secularist, but he has arrived at the same destination. Both have refused to come to God on His terms. As a result, they pursue an inadequate solution for their inadequately defined problem, which will leave them inadequately prepared to meet God.

 An Ancient Nominalist

     In Luke 18:9-14, Jesus gives us a classic picture of the nominalist mentality in action. Luke records in verse 9, “And He also told this parable to certain ones who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and viewed others with contempt." Jesus told this parable to expose the folly of those who attempted to relate to God on the basis of their own character, religious efforts, or religious affiliation, as if they had the ability to secure God's righteousness on their own merit.

     Jesus continued, "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax gatherer" (verse 10). The Pharisees were the leaders of the Jewish religious establishment. They knew all the right things to do and say and were enthusiastically committed to their expression of the Jewish faith. They knew the Old Testament Scriptures and claimed to be the spiritual guides of the nation of Israel. At first glance, someone from this category might be your pick for the one "most likely to relate properly to the living God."

     On the other hand, the publican (the tax collector) was hated by his countrymen for his complicity with the Roman oppressor. On the spectrum of the Jewish religious scene the publican fell on the opposite end from the Pharisee. The Temple is the last place we would expect to find this man.

     With the stage set, Jesus recounted the words of the Pharisee, "God, I thank Thee that I am not like the other people: swindlers, unjust, adulturers, or even like this tax gatherer. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get" (verses 11 and 12).

     This man reasoned, "I belong to the people of God, the nation of Israel, and even more than that, I have achieved a high position of religious leadership. I do all the right things. I deserve God's approval; what more could He want? Right standing before God is certainly a must, but thankfully I'm up to the task of earning it. It wasn't easy, but I'm glad I am who I am instead of being like this publican over here."

     What a complete contrast to the publican. "But the tax gatherer, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, 'God be merciful to me, the sinner!' " (verse 13). The publican saw matters clearly. He was helpless, a sinner, totally dependent on the grace of God to remedy his hopeless situation. All he could do was appeal to God for mercy. The verb be merciful means "be propitiated." As we have noted, propitiation is that theme of salvation that refers to averting God's anger and wrath by dealing with God on the basis of His mercy. The publican knew this was his only hope .

    Two diametrically opposed heart attitudes are contrasted here, one prideful, the other repentant. Jesus closed the parable by telling His listeners which one was approved by God. "I tell you, this man [the publican] went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, but he who humbles himself shall be exalted" (verse 14). Only the publican found God's mercy that day. By inference, the Pharisee continued in an unjustified state, out of touch with God's grace, still under His condemnation, an object of His wrath.

 This parable gives us two insights into the importance of the heart attitude, as opposed to the external concerns of religious sincerity and religious affiliation.

     (1) Mere religious affiliation is not enough to secure God's approval. If it were, the Pharisee would have been approved by God. He was one of his generation's most religiously committed people, but this was not good enough.

     (2) The issue in anyone's relationship to God is one of heart attitude. Paul states in Romans 2:28,29, "For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly; neither is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh. But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that which is of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter; and his praise is not from men, but from God. "

     This was the failure of the Pharisee. The externals were all in order. But his religious affiliation, commitment to religious observances and the degree of intensity with which he held his religious convictions were all for naught. The external label, "Pharisee," and the thin veneer of religious practice served only to hide a heart that was radically out of tune with God's perspective on his spiritual need.

     The Pharisee, like many nominalists, was deceived by his pride and sense of self-justification into making some serious miscalculations. As C. S. Lewis observed, "As long as you are proud, you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you."5 The nominalist's heart, blinded to the reality of God's holiness, will invariably overestimate its own righteousness and, therefore, its ability to please God. In his own eyes, the nominalist is not helpless, nor is his situation hopeless. He assumes that his own opinion of himself is true and that God must therefore concur. Pascal observed, "There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who believe themselves sinners; the rest sinners who believe themselves righteous."6 As the Pharisee elevated himself, he simultaneously lowered God's standard of holiness and nullified the cross of Christ.

     Nominalist reasoning is grounded in the ignorance of pride and is oblivious to the theological realities of man's sin, God's holiness and grace's necessity. The nominalist suffers from the same spiritual blindness as does the secularist.

 The Nominalist Alive and Well

     According to a 1979 Gallup Poll, the vast majority of Americans still identify to some degree with biblical terminology, if not a biblical framework for interpreting life.

    Consider that 80 percent of those polled believe that Jesus Christ is divine. Ninety-four percent believe in God or in a universal spirit. Eighty-seven percent of those who said they believe in God find comfort in their belief; about half said this belief gives them great comfort.7 Fifty-seven percent of American adults said that their religious beliefs are "very important" ; only 15 percent said they were "not too important" and 4 percent "not at all important."8 Ninety-eight percent of American homes have at least one Bible.

     This weekend 54 percent of the adult population of Americans will go to church or synagogue. Only 33 percent will watch a football game on TV: Thirty-one million adults claim to be evangelicals. It is not surprising that in this cultural context "almost half (45 percent) of the American adults are clear on how to go to heaven and are quite willing to say they believe it to be true."9

     This segment of the population is what Gallup calls "the company of the orthodox,"10 They believe that "the only hope for heaven is through personal faith in Jesus Christ," that Jesus Christ is God or the Son of God, that He was raised from the dead, and that the Bible is the Word of God.

     Even a majority of the "unchurched" (those who are not members, or do not identify themselves with the institution of the church) believe that Jesus is the Son of God and was raised from the dead. Forty percent of the unchurched claim to have made a "personal commitment to Jesus Christ." Nine in ten have some sort of traditional religious background.11

     These statistics led Christianity Today to conclude that basic Christian doctrine is "pervasive" in American society. But what does all of this mean, especially as it relates to communicating the gospel to a culture such as ours?

     Before we answer this, we must consider the negative side of these statistics. While 84 percent believe that the Ten Commandments are for today, only half of the population can name five of them.12 While 94 percent said that they "believe in God," only 39.5 million out of 155 million adults claim a conversion experience that fits even a minimum biblical norm. That leaves more than 100 million American adults who say they believe in God but do not claim to have had a genuine personal encounter with Christ. Eighty percent believe that Jesus Christ is divine, but only around 50 percent – or 69 million adults – say they are hoping to go to heaven because of their faith in Jesus Christ. While these same 69 million American adults are "hoping to go to heaven only because of their personal faith in Jesus Christ," only 29.5 million claim a conversion "that included asking Christ to be personal Savior.”13

Ann Landers for Theologian of the Year

     No one better typifies mainstream American thinking on various topics than our own Ann Landers. In a recent column she, albeit unknowingly, clearly articulated the nominalist perspective on the gospel.

     The couple who wrote her were nominal "Christians," and they were aghast that two of their children would suggest to them that they should be "born again." Indeed, these children had the gall to tell their parents that they would not go to heaven otherwise.

     Ann came to this couple's rescue by assuring them that although the phrase, "born again," is in the Bible, it certainly need not apply to them if they are uncomfortable with it. Ann wrote, "I have no quarrel with those who are sincere in their beliefs, but I feel it is unfair of your children to try to proselytize you. A kind and generous God has room in heaven for a wide variety of believers, including those who were only born once....your credentials for passing through the pearly gates are as good as theirs."14

     The lesson is obvious. "It is religious affiliation that ensures heaven, not one's heart response to the gospel."

The Gospel and the Nominalist

     What are we to conclude from this brief analysis? Gallup interprets these statistics as indicating a huge gap between belief and commitment. For instance, while 68 percent of the teenagers say they feel they have been in the presence of God, only 22 percent say their religious beliefs are the "most important influence in their lives." This is not to pick out teenagers as the only ones with this commitment gap. Gallup observes that while the solid majority of Americans regard religion as important, relatively few say it is one of the most important influences in their lives.15

     The implication is that we are a nation of spiritual illiterates. Gallup observes that "a significant proportion (in the case of Christians) can articulate only in the most vague fashion the significance of the resurrection of Jesus Christ for mankind."16

     This spiritual illiteracy, or what Gallup calls "a glaring lack of knowledge about the basic facts of our religious heritage and a fuzziness about the central tenets of our religions,"17 is evidence that a populace that seems to be spiritually in tune with Christian truth is, in reality, sadly ignorant of it.

    These findings touch on the work of evangelism in two areas. First, we should expect a vast reservoir of good will and initial interest in the gospel from our audience. From these statistics, it is obvious that the vestiges of Christian truth remain in the consciousness of a majority of Americans. The grand biblical themes of the incarnation, redemption in Jesus Christ and God's revelation to man in the Bible are at least somewhat familiar ideas to most Americans. Thus, we are dealing with an audience who, in large part, consider themselves to be "Christian." We are more likely to run into a person who went to church last Sunday than one who watched a professional football game, and this fact should encourage us.

     Many nominalists are dissatisfied with the barrenness of mere "belief." They are ready for the life-changing power that comes only from a personal commitment to Christ. They need only a clear, concise presentation of the gospel, with an emphasis on how Jesus wants to make that twelve-inch journey from their head to their heart.

 Nice, But Not Necessary

     Second, we can expect to encounter a curious cultural climate in Which nominalists are relatively open to the gospel, but are ignorant of the personal implications of Jesus' crucial call to repentance and faith. They are content to live with the gap between belief and commitment. They treat Christian truth much like chewing gum. They taste it, chew it a bit, but never swallow it. When is loses its taste, they spit it out. Such nominalists find the gospel interesting, even somewhat relevant, but hardly the best news ever told.

     I picked up one such nominalist who was hitchhiking in Iowa. During our hundred miles together we had a good chance to discuss the gospel. "I like talking with people like you," he said. "Jesus is great because He makes people happy and harmless." When I asked if he didn't think that trusting Jesus Christ was life's most crucial decision, he replied, "Of course not. It's nice to be into Christ, but not necessary."

     The challenge to the Christian communicator lies not in convincing these nominalists of the general relevance of christianity. They are already convinced. Rather, the challenge lies in personalizing the gospel – communicating Christ with precision, clarity, urgency and sensitivity so the nominalist can understand that making a decision to trust in Christ really is life's most crucial necessity.